[4] 18
Million Jobs. The Nation, March 9, 2010, p. 13. The $850b banks hold in the Fed
should be used and the U.S. could move $700b in new credit into domestic
employment focused investments Heroes, Hacks & Fools; Memoirs from the
Political Inside, Ted Van Dyk, 2007, p. 204

[5]18
Million Jobs. The Nation, March 9., 2010,
p. 13; The $850b banks hold in the Fed should be used and the U.S. could
move $700b in new credit into domestic employment-focused investments; Heroes,
Hacks & Fools; Memoirs from the Political Inside, Ted Van Dyk, 2007, p. 204

[30]The
British do terrorism so much better. Perhaps the difference is that we were
attacked from the outside whereas Britain is attacked from the inside, so the
challenge for us now is to respond to terrorist attacks from outside with the
same kind of restraint the British have for the most part shown in dealing with
attacks from within: patiently keep individuals under surveillance for as long
as possible in order to gather valuable intelligence about the operation and
develop a strong case that would support criminal prosecution (avoiding the
failed military approach in Northern Ireland); Britain has used its long
experience with terrorism with greater success bringing terrorists to trial;
Britain has been subject to international legal constraints (ECHR)for more than
fifty years so it is held responsible to a third party’s view so that it must
justify its’ actions rather than secretly convene Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft,
Tenet, Powell and Rice, who just responded to local fears and passions.(Britain
has been stopped from coercive interrogation, deportation to torture,
unregulated wiretapping and indefinite detention) David Cole, The Brits Do It
Better, The New York Review, June 12, 2008, p. 68

[31]The
Southwest is becoming more independent politically (25%) (NYT 10/24/06), so
switching to preserving gun rights (a “security” issue) makes special sense
now. Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California are going increasingly going
the same way

[32](Associated
Press, October 7, 2001, report, in a story titled “Taliban Offer to Detain bin
Laden”: “ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) ”in a desperate eleventh hour appeal to halt
U.S. attacks. Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban offered Sunday to detain terrorist
suspect Osama bin Laden and try him under Islamic law if the United States
makes a formal request.”) We will deal with terrorist threats: identify the
crime and the criminals, try their cases and punish them; we’ll gain
international support for dismantling their organizations, making arrests and
prosecuting. Germany did it with the Red
Army Faction, Italy against the Red Brigades, and Greece in response to the 17
November terrorist group. All three of these terrorist groups had spread to
multiple nations and required international efforts to bring them to justice.
Even the United Kingdom never made the blunder of “declaring war” on the IRA,
and therefore now Northern Ireland is far more peaceful than it was a few
decades ago.

But George W. Bush---having no policy, his economic
policies failing---needed the bounce in the polls that his father had gotten by
declaring war on Saddam; it helped that Bush’s campaign contributors wanted
Iraq’s oil. Bush ignored international opinion and international law to declare
a preemptive war…the first in the 227-years history of the United States…on a
nation that had not first attacked and didn’t represent a threat to us.

At the same time, Bush used powers designed for a
time of REAL war---when the United States was under attack by another
nation---to cut into the personal rights and liberties held to be theirs by
Americans since the days we began.

Terrorism is not a threat to democracy---it’s only a
tactic. We can’t fight a war against ‘terror’. There’s no enemy called
‘terror’. But a threat to democracy comes from leaders who purposely use acts
of terror---as Hitler successfully did with the burning of the Reichstag
building---to turn a peaceful country military.

It’s time to declare the ‘wars’ over---both the “war
against terrorism” and the “war against Iraq”---and return our protected
liberties to us. We should take apart the Pentagon’s false reporting, recapture
Mr. Gonzalez’ Justice Department, re-install the firewall that prevents our
military from acting against our civilians, and return America to a sense of
normalcy. Even if there was another al Qaeda attack on American soil, war
wouldn’t stop it any better than against bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or
Iraq. It’s crucial to bring the police agencies of the world together to arrest
and prosecute terrorists who attack us. War doesn’t do the job. “as cited in
“What Would Jefferson Do”, Harmann, Thom, Three Rivers Press, New York, p. 222.

[35]Ibid.
I believe we should persuade, or induce, the six powers to stop spending the
money and gradually reduce their nuclear weapons and any missile defense. In
return for America’s being the most effective military, we should give up our
fixed, enormous, margin as the strongest power. America could start by
announcing, pending complete reduction, that it will never be the first to use
a nuclear weapon in a conflict. And if America stops trumpeting its desire to
dominate the world militarily, the Chinese would stop spending on defense once
their access to necessary oil is satisfied.. We should avoid proliferation by
joining with every nuclear power to deny nuclear weapons to terrorists as we
give them up. This is the only way. p. 3, 115

[36]It
was later discovered that 8 of the 9 Republicans serving on the Senate Aviation
Subcommittee had received airline PAC contributions in 1996 supra, p. 98

[42]Senator
Obama introduced the single-most comprehensive ethics reform bill in the U.S.
Senate…it would have governed the behavior of lobbyists, senators and
representatives, and their staffs. But the Senate, still limited by the other
party, rejected an independent “Office of Public Integrity” 67- 30, even after
the State Department auditor found that a $14 billion fund for Iraqi
reconstruction has been used to hide cost overruns of the Iraqi “war” (New York
Times, 7/31/06)

[43] Elizabeth Warren, The Game is
Rigged, The Progressive, July/August 2014, p. 34

[45]Now,
pending effectiveness of public financing of election campaigns, since union
members’ money cannot be used for a political purpose without permission of the
union member, pass laws that corporate money cannot be used without the
permission of the shareholders.

[46]Reich,
Supercapitalism, p. 223; Drift, Rachel Maddow, intro: modern national security
state, with its tens of thousands of “privateers” its bloated Department of
Homeland Security, its rusting nuclear weapons, ill-maintained and difficult to
dismantle, and its strange fascination with an unproven counterinsurgency
doctrine.

[47] Intelligent Governance for the
Twenty-first Century, Berggruen, Nicolas and Gardels, Nathan, Polity, 2012
state that, America less dominant, a more ‘inclusive’ globalization is
required.

[48]
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan: $1000 tax cut for middle class families;
energy rebates from windfall profits tax; domestic job creation to replace
outsourcing; creation of 5m innovation and mfg green, infrastructure, research
and technology eliminate all capital gains taxes on creation of small
businesses, crackdown on fraudulent homeownership brokers and lenders, fight
predatory credit card practices, reform bankruptcy to protect working people,
to ban executive bonuses for bankrupt companies and to require disclosure of
all pension investments and help working families by doubling funding for
after-school programs, expanding the Family medical leave Act provide
low-income families with a refundable tax credit to help with their child-care
expenses, and encourage flexible work schedules.

Nader’s
proposal: "Seventeen Solutions." practicality, fairness, efficiency,
safety, employment potential and respect for future generations. 1) strong law
enforcement against corporate crime and fraud and abuses against consumers,
taxpayers, the environment and workers; 2) beef up the law enforcement budgets
which will pay for themselves many, many times over in deterrence, damage
prevention to innocent people, and fines; 3) Medicare for all with free choice
of doctor and hospital; simpler and far less expensive per capita, and tens of
thousands of American lives saved; 4) public facilities (public works) repaired
and expanded to meet needs, ending the vast disrepair in our water and sewage
systems, schools, clinics, libraries, public transit, highways and bridges
creates well-paying jobs that cannot be exported to China; 5) reducing the
well-documented, bloated military budget, demilitarizing our foreign policy
will save the horrendous costs and after costs of these boomeranging wars of
aggressive choice; 6) Get Congress to have "skin in the game," such
as no health and other benefits for them, unless all people have them. There
would be no taking our country into war without all able-bodied and
age-qualified children of the Senators and Representatives being drafted into
the armed forces. This duty will encourage Congress to attend to its
deliberative, constitutional obligations and not heave them over to a lawless,
out-of-control presidency; 7) alternatives to the commercial exploitation of
children by non-stop big corporate trickster marketers do violent programming;
8) Getting corporations off welfare, making them pay their fair share of taxes
(GE is a profitable tax escapee that even gets checks from the Treasury Department
due to the rigged tax code); 9) taxing
dividends and capital gains the same as ordinary income of working people, and
imposing a tiny transaction sales tax on Wall Street speculation; 10) using
regular government purchasing specifications for better goods and services to
stimulate innovation and safety with our tax dollars; 11) organizing
Congressional watchdog groups in every Congressional District around these and
other solutions; 12) local community banks, credit unions, farmer
markets, renewable energy, and community health clinics, with emphasis on
prevention (more self-reliant); 14) Local democracy, starting in elementary and
high schools, working on real problems in the communities (testing air, water,
soil samples and electromagnetic levels, and reporting the results to their
community). Studying books such as the newly released Slow Democracy (Chelsea
Press, 2012) will give you many examples and tools to demonstrate that it's
easier than you think. Robert Frank’s infrastructure capital improvement
programs, new tax policies, reducing highway congestion, curbing carbon
emissions and other remedial actions that pay off, with a few simple policy
changes, we could restore full employment, rebuild crumbling infrastructure and
pay down the national debt without requiring real sacrifices from anyone."

[53]Hacker,
Jacob S. The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of
the American Dream, p. xv; Einhorn, Eric S., Logue, John, Can Welfare States Be
Sustained? Lessons from Scandinavia, Political Science Quarterly, Spring 2010,
p. 1 demonstrates the superior characteristics of the welfare states of Western
Europe, which provide extensive guarantees to working people, universal and
largely free health care, good pensions, paid vacations, sick leave, job
security, free higher education. Our current high-wage, high-benefit are being
swamped by low-cost China and India while Nordic countries’ European social
model show steady economic growth, fiscal balance and sustainability by practices of innovation and continuous
assessment. They appear recession-proof. Most Americans support government
intervention in healthcare, education, and jobs, and are willing to pay taxes
for these benefits to reduce inequality. Class War? What Americans Really Think
about Economic Inequality, Political Science Quarterly, Spring, 2010, p. 133

[65] This point was made clear in
a 2011 Duke-Harvard study. Surveying a nationally-representative sample of
respondents, the study found that Americans thought that the wealthiest 20
percent retained 59 percent of all wealth, when in reality they held more like
84 percent (a 25 percentage point difference). Differences between perceptions
and reality became even more extreme when comparing what Americans wanted the
wealth distribution to look like, in contrast to what it looks like.
Respondents said that the "ideal" wealth breakdown would allow the
richest 20 percent just 32 percent of all wealth, compared to their actual 84
percent (an astounding 52 percentage point difference). But, as of December 2011 (the last time the question
was surveyed), the Pew Research Center found that nearly six in ten Americans
(58 percent) rejected the idea that American society is " divided into two
groups, the haves and the have-nots."

This
finding seems all the more strange considering that just 46 percent of
Americans categorized themselves as " haves," and nearly four in ten
(38 percent) designated themselves as "have-nots" - strongly
overlapping with the recent finding that 40 percent of Americans hold no
financial wealth.

Much
of the reason for rejecting the idea that America is divided between haves and
have-nots comes from the public's excessive optimism. The December 2011 Pew
survey found that 58 percent of Americans agreed "most people who want to
get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard." This is likely due
in part to the naïve assessment of 85 percent of Americans that they are part
of the "middle class," despite the fact that the bottom 40 percent of
Americans earned just 10 percent of all income, and that they earned far less
than the median national family income of approximately $50,000 a year (28
percent of households earned less than $25,000 a year, and the next 12 percent
earned less than $35,000). The optimistic view that "everyone is middle
class" is blatantly contradicted by the finding (post-2008) that the vast
majority of new wealth created (93% of all annual income gains) goes to the
wealthiest one percent, and that half of Americans have no financial wealth.
Americans are an individualistic culture in which the failures of the poor are
rationalized as "deserved" due to their alleged lack of work ethic or
commitment to personal sacrifice in the pursuit of eventual prosperity.
Americans' lack of class-consciousness, however, is an entirely predictable
product of two major factors: socialization and material privilege. To put it
simply, those who have been indoctrinated to ignore America's class divide, and
those who are on the winning side of that class divide (the materially
privileged and affluent) are the most susceptible to propaganda that celebrates
America as the land of "endless opportunity" for those willing to
work hard enough.

Analyzing Pew surveys, shows that class
deniers are statistically more likely to be male, Republican, conservative, Fox
News viewers, "born again" Evangelicals, from non-union households
and having available job choices.

[67] Economist, p. 3, 5/16/14; but
the 1952 to 2000, mainly Republican, years, showed 11.5% of GDP up to 22% of
wealth for finance, insurance, and real estate; eight of Mitt Romney’s ten
biggest donors were Wall Stsreet firms and 90% of its $70 million in donations
was raised from 24 people. Jonathan Alter, The Center Holds, p 201-2

[68] Too gradually, because this,different,
asset loss, Great Recession cut
workers and families savings, house equities, tuitions and other asset values.
This recession was different from jiggles in the stock market. It was
fundamental because the fraud by financial institutions with others money was unregulated and ran amok.

[78] Sweden has reduced public
spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% in 2012. It has also
cut the top marginal tax rate by 27% since 1983 to 57%, and scrapped taxes on
property, gifts, wealth and inheritance. In 2013 it is cutting the corporate
tax rate from 26.3% to 22%. Most daringly it has introduced a universal system
of school vouchers and invited private schools to compete with public ones.
Private companies also vie with each other to provide state-funded health
services and care for the elderly. The two decades from 1990 were a period of
recovery: GDP growth between 1993 and 2010 averaged 2.7% a year and productivity
2.1% a year compared with 1.9% and 1% respectively for the main 15 EU
countries. The other Nordic countries have been moving in the same direction.

The
necessary correction is cultural change to form the sovereign wealth fund from
oil revenues to provide public contribution to private funds for: 1) fiscal
responsibility(no more unpaid for wars, drug benefits); 2) retain competitiveness; 3) relentless
innovation (medical insulin, wind turbines, a biotech cluster called Medicon
Valley, machine tools, application of the internet vinegar breweries, organic
orchards, and education to include job-worthiness for the entire population to
keep social mobility, catalysts, increased productivity, automated recycling
and checkouts, telecommunication networks, bio-refining, stabilizing of oil
digging rigs, cleaning ships’ exhaust, start-up saunas, encouraging
universities to commercialize their ideas and training); 4) preserve limited
resources. For earned benefits of workers, require sufficient contributions and
bring benefits into line with lifetime incomes. For education, provide free
schools, some run by private companies (they’re spending only 6.4% of GDP in
2009 vs. 7.3% in America, by providing respect to a relatively low paid
profession). Provide work for 80% of the population to provide support for
those without work.

[79] Congress, 7/31/14, passed an
appropriation of only $659 million compared with the adequate $3.7 billion
requested by President Obama, Can the voters change the GOP, Seattle Times, p
A9

[80] Stimulus Is Maligned, But
Options Were Few, New York Times, 2/29/12 p. B1

The
Eurozone countries, in contrast, have created a host of new continent-wide
institutions, built a substantial financial firewall to prevent debt problems
from spreading, and are not well on their way to creating a banking union and a
partial fiscal union. The European Central Bank (ECB) has been able to issue
direct political demands to national leaders and obtaining from Eurozone
governments 440b euros for the newly created European Stability Facility
(EFSF). The ECB bought Italian and Spanish bonds to drive down their interest
costs, In return, Rome and Madrid committed to making specific reforms, such as
substantial budget tightening, fresh liquidity and they targeted support for
Spanish banks their interest costs. The European Union (EU) has decided to
implement a banking UNION, jointly supervised and regulated, with the authority
to shut failed banks and provide region-wide deposit insurance, sharing
responsibility for modest amounts of debt and adopting firm common rules for
budget discipline. C. Fred Bergsten, Why the Euro Will Survive: Completing the
Continent’s Half-Build House, Foreign
Affairs, September/October 2012, p. 16

[87] The Slumps That Shaped Modern
Finance, The Economist, 4/12/2014 p. 49ff

[88] The
current regulatory system guarantees that the environment will be damaged, the
system actually permits damage to occur, and that the system is built to
recognize certain constitutional constraints.

# Our “engaging in the regulatory system”, while limiting
some of the harms done by corporations, cannot achieve the types of change we
need, and that we are colonized to believe that it actually can.

# Our thinking is colonized not only by the law – which
establishes certain constraints that deny us the goals of our activism – but
that our thinking is colonized by a culture that is created by those who
benefit from the way that the system operates.

# On the issue of land application of sewage sludge, we’ve
been colonized that a bad is a good, through language used to frame the issue.

# On the issue of the corporatization of agriculture,
we’ve been colonized that a bad is a good, through language used to frame the
issue.

# Both the regulatory system of law and the culture
produce a system of activism that cannot stop a corporate minority from
governing community majorities, and that the regulatory system of law and
culture effectively drives us like cattle down to a point of activism where we
cannot win the issue that we’re working on.

# A regulatory system of law governs employer-employee
relationships, and that regulatory system of law codifies the rights of the
employer over the employee law codifies the rights of the employer over the
employee.

# Regulatory systems of law were created not to protect
health, safety, and welfare, but as a governmental barrier to prevent majority
governance.

# The traditional use of the regulatory system of law, and
the operation of today’s regulatory agencies, are not mistakes or errors, but a
logical use of the law to assert minority control over majorities.

# Law itself has a long history of being used by a
minority to govern, that it was used by William the Conqueror to create an
English structure of law; and that the mere existence of Constitutions does not
guarantee democratic government.

# Throughout history, there have always been people who
have seen that illegitimate structure of governance, and demanded something
else, like the English Levelers and Diggers in the 1600’s.

Put caps on salaries and give the shareholders a ‘say
on pay’. Update the Equal Pay Act of 1963 with the Paycheck Fairness Act, which
allows victims of wage discrimination to collect information about employees’
salaries without fear of retaliation.

The current regulatory system guarantees that the
environment will be damaged, the system actually permits damage to occur, and
that the system is built to recognize certain constitutional constraints.

[98]American
banks would have to double the present minimum core-capital ratio of 4% to
avoid raising equity or breaching that floor at the bottom of the business
cycle. Taxpayers can either have cheap loans and pay for bail-outs, or pricier
loans and bigger buffers. Society clearly prefers the bigger buffers. The new
capital regime must be harder to game,
must admit only PURE equity as capital, should use rolling “stress tests” and
allow capital surcharges over and above the global minimum standard to ‘fine’
banks that pose a bigger threat to taxpayers. There is a risk that the blunt
tool of capital will be asked to do too much: fine-tuning pay policies, for
example, and discouraging certain types of trading. But the broad objective
must be gradually to prod banks to shrink and improve their liquidity. The
Economist, July 11, p. 16

[99]Rewarding
Incompetence: The CEOs of 10 Wall Street firms that either failed or received
taxpayer bailouts were paid an average of $28.9 million per year in the years
leading up to the Wall Street meltdown. Their average pay this decade,
calculated through 2007, equaled 575 times the median American family’s
2007income to wit:

[102]29
Krugman: Reagan did it…modest size problems of the thrifts into an utter
catastrophe FOR THE TAXPAYER, $130b in
1989 and trillions 25 years ltter; small
minority grew vastly rich while working families saw only meager gains and to
hell with fiscal prudence; traditionally
did deficits only when war or economic emergency and federal debt fell steadily
from the end of WWII UNTIL 1980; and the
increase in public debt was dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible
by deregulation; Americans saved q10% in
1970

[121] Of Plumbing and Promises: The
Backoffice Moves to Center Stage, The Economist, February 25, 2012, p. 13

[122] Using more objective ratings
by/from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to be adopted
by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the Comptroller of the Currency by
February, 2012. The formula is based on the company’s cash flow, leverage and
volatility of its stock price to assess the riskiness of corporate debt. States
should extend the same formula to insurance companies and pension funds,
eliminating rateers from their regulations. New York Times, 12/15/11, p. A32

[138]An
alternative *method, revolutionary in its difference, is to fix the Fed by
requiring ‘liability reserves’ (the government would control because all
reserves held by the government would be covered by a repurchase agreement
requiring the bank to BUY BACK what it sold to the Fed, on a fixed date and at
the same price). Giving the central bank money it could then inject as stimulus
into the credit system, into banks and nonbanks alike will be standby money for
necessary loans. This is funding the Fed can WITHDRAW later if the economy no
longer needs a boost.

[142]They
would be required to demonstrate regularly how they would wind down their
affairs in an orderly manner in the event of failure. We must probably
duplicate enactment of the EU’s power to demand restructuring of a company that
has received state aid. That has already
been done with German banks. The Economist, July, 2009, p. 55 And the pay
culture that rewards bank bosses for short-term risk-taking has to be
controlled….a “social contract”: between banks and society, which would impose
more realistic costs on banks for , which proved to be an effective way of
channelings resouirces to Greece, Ireland, and Portuigal.the taxpayer’s
implicit guarantee, must be formulated and imposed. p. 56

[146]29
Joe Klein, TIME, May 4, 2009, p. 22; Geithner's Plan:
In advance of his second attempt to roll out a plan to buy up so-called
"toxic assets" from banks, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pens anop-ed in which he says "the
private sector will set prices" and "the taxpayers will share in any
upside."
"This program to address legacy loans and securities is part of an overall
strategy to resolve the crisis as quickly and effectively as possible at least
cost to the taxpayer. The Public-Private Investment Program is better for the
taxpayer than having the government alone directly purchase the assets from
banks that are still operating and assume a larger share of the losses. Our
approach shares risk with the private sector, efficiently leverages taxpayer
dollars, and deploys private-sector competition to determine market prices for
currently illiquid assets. Simply hoping for banks to work these assets off
over time risks prolonging the crisis in a repeat of the Japanese
experience."

[153] Richard Eskow, Yes We Can
Have Banks that Work for the People, 3/29/2013, The Blog

[154] Our actions in Iraq and
Afghanistan were not defense. They were offense against countries which were
not the al Qaeda. They should have been prosecuted as crimes. Other countries
have non-war responses to terrorism.

[156] Only a minority of Americans
favor global trade (with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia), believing they do
not benefit the U.S. economy, they want the U.S. out of the World Trade
Organization, they believe China is at
fault and China-bashing is becoming bipartisan. Neither immigration, nor trade,
nor China’s currency manipulation is the cause of America’s high unemployment.
All three predated the crash of 2008, before which unemployment was only 5
percent. But the global workforce increasingly having steadily-improving skills
and higher productivity, and immigration and trade assisting top executives and
professionals to find cheaper labor and larger markets for their own skills and
insights all are part of the new views. Many aging boomers are understandably
anxious about their retirement, while America’s young - whose skins are more
likely than those of boomer retirees to be brown or black - face years of
joblessness. The jobless rate among people under 25 is already over 17 percent.
For young people of color it’s above 20 percent. For young college grads - who
assumed a bachelors’ degree was a ticket to upward mobility - unemployment has
reached 10 percent. Yet these percentages are likely to rise if boomers decide
they can’t afford to retire, and thereby block the jobs pipeline for younger
people seeking employment. Opposition is set up in a declining economy: elderly
communities already resist property tax hikes to pay for local schools. After
the enactment of Medicare in 1965, poverty among the elderly declined markedly,
but Medicare and Social Security cost more than $1 trillion a year and account
for about a third of the federal budget. They will be traded off against
programs that benefit the young: Title I funding for low-income school-age
students; Head Start; food stamps; child nutrition; children’s health; and
vaccines. It’s likely that Medicaid - Medicare’s poor stepchild, half of whose
recipients are children - will also be on the cutting board. Nevertheless
poverty among America’s children will continue to rise since they lack
expensive, effective lobbying presence

[165]A 2005 survey by the American Society
of Civil Engineers estimated it would cost the U.S. $1.6 trillion to shore up
America’s aging infrastructure---bridges, roads, power grid--- just to bring it
up to the bare minimum standards. That is two-thirds of the entire federal
budget today.

[173]Krugman, NYT, 1/14/2009
Maintain a consistent strategy. The Bush administration and the Fed did
not. They crushed Fannie’s and Freddie’s
stock holders. They saved Citigroup’s. Ad-hockery is costly; it keeps private
capital on the sidelines for fear of being wiped out in the next Sunday night
rescue. And the government is now on the hook for perhaps trillions of dollars
of guarantees and new capital. The Economist, 1/10/2009. P. 22

[178] supra,
p. 9, 10;The business of extracting fat fees from creating complex debt
structures is in tatters. Banks’ balance sheets are at once weakened by large
losses on subprime-related products and swollen with unwanted assets from
defunct structured investment vehicles. Secretary of Treasury Paulson admitted
“there is not a single or simple solution that will undo the excesses of the
last few years. Economist, January 12,2008, p. 14 The 1930s proved that the
risk of being penalized after the fact is often too weak a disincentive. The
transparency created thereafter, however, entirely failed in the 1980s and
1990s Deregulations and lax enforcement
of the regulations that remained eroded professional norms that had constrained
rank opportunism. Supposedly independent auditors colluded with management to
dress up corporate books. Ostensibly fair-minded securities analysis serving
investors turned out to be stock touts looking to bring their firm underwriting
business base on their success in running up a client company’s share price.
Boards of directors that allegedly represented shareholders helped crony FCEOs
reap astronomical compensation packages largely disconnected from actual
company performance. Corporate boards promoted stock options that gave
executives incentives not to optimize true performance but to inflate the share
price in the short run. Mutual funds, rather than serving as the agents of
investors, took huge transaction fees and invariably voted their shares with
management. Brokers and investment bankers helped themselves and their favorite
clients to new stock issues (IPOs) at preferential prices not available to the
public. Institutions of self-regulation, such as the National Association of
Securities Dealers, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, and
the New York Stock Exchange, went after minor infractions but not the deeper
corruption. The whole scheme depended on excess borrowing and bankers’
complicity. None of this would have been possible without multiple forms of
deregulation. And in 1995 a bipartisan majority passed, over President
Clinton’s veto, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, making it much
more difficult for shareholders to win lawsuits against corporations ore underwriters
that deliberately falsified information. Robert Kuttner, p. 75-8.

[182]Congress was on board, somehow
shucking the employees’ pension payments, supervising the reorganization of the
bankrupt Northeastern railroad and then forming Con rail in 1975 to run them.
By 1981 it was turning a profit hauling freight, and eventually its operations
were sold back to privately operated lines. Penn Central had gone bankrupt in
1970. Re GM, managed bankruptcy…the union has been asked to ‘give’ four
times…bondholders’ turn.

[183] Put
caps on salaries and give the shareholders a ‘say on pay’. Update the Equal Pay
Act of 1963 with the Paycheck Fairness Act, which allows victims of wage
discrimination to collect information about employees’ salaries without fear of
retaliation.

[191] Put
caps on salaries and give the shareholders a ‘say on pay’. Update the Equal Pay
Act of 1963 with the Paycheck Fairness Act, which allows victims of wage
discrimination to collect information about employees’ salaries without fear of
retaliation.

[191] “Sticking
Banks with the Bill”, New York Times, August, 2010, p. B1 Caveat emptor should
apply. Lenders should be forced to re-purchase non-performing loans. The law
which makes the TAXPAYER liable for private enterprise incompetence should be
repealed.

[191] The
Asian to Global Financial Crisis: An Asian Regulator’s View of Unfettered
Finance in the 1990s and 2000s. by Andrew Sheng, Cambridge University Press,
2009,

[192]
capital requirements were 12-1 when our economy was stable, Canada ‘gets
nasty’, per Julie Dickson, before 20-1 is reached and ‘Wall Street’ was at 30-1
just before the crash in 2008. Canada has effective regulation of lending, and
‘gets nasty’ when a lender approaches 20-1.,

[193] A Stampede of Takeovers Could
Mean Growth Ahead, or Just a Rise in Irrationality, New York Times, 8/8/14 p.
B1

[194] Free Exchange: Land of the
Corporate Giants, The Economist, 11/3/2012, p. 76: By fhe cost function analysis, recent mergers
of health-care businesses, elimination of competition left prices rising after
the merger…trying to become too-big-to-fail. 2/3 of managers over estimate the
merger advantages in their reports to business leaders.

[195] An irresistible urge to
merge, The Economist, July 19, 2014, p. 57

[197] NYT,
5/21/2011 Be Careful Wishing for the Fed’s End, News of the Week, p. 7

[198] A
2007 report urged that the whole European social and economic model was at risk
because hedge funds and private-equity firms are able to swoop in and to
eviscerate Europe’s productive corporations and its collaborative labor relations.
“In a number of fields in our social market economy WHERE FINANCIAL MARKETS
LIKE THAT DOMINATE, we see DECLINING RATE OF REAL INVESTMENT AS A PERCENTAGE OF
CASH FLOW; THE STEADY INCREASE OF DIVIDENDS AND EXTREME EXECUTIVE SALARIES,
STOCK OPTIONS AND MANAGEMENT FEES…and even less income retained internally in
companies as leveraged buyouts extract more value; the decline of capital stock
relative to the gross profit; investment in R&D stagnating or declining as
a percentage of expenditures; and deteriorating working conditions.

Require all funds selling shares to the public to register
and provide the same kind of disclosures previously required for these
investments so every investor can see what is being done. These elites have
fanned everyone’s desire to have more money by boosting the stock market,
relaxing mortgage lending, loosening regulatory oversight and, without
disclosing the risks, selling the debt worldwide to creditors who can close
down the credit needed by all worldwide business as well as the mortgages on
our homes. They did this ‘financial engineering’ so they can make more fees and
also profit by selling bad assets they mortgage before the loans crumble under
the rest of us. The cost in millions to American families who invested in the
American dream is crippling. To protect ourselves in our homes Congress must
regulate lenders to protect the huge $6.45 trillion mortgage securities market.

[199] NYT,1/11/08,
p.1 The excessive speculation that dominates the real economy widens
inequality, reduces economic efficiency, and increases systemic risk. The top
two, alarming, systemic threats to the economy arise from the exponential
proliferation of hedge funds and private equity and the increased dependence of
the entire economy on borrowing from abroad. increasingly speculative financial
markets permitted by cumulative deregulation and supercharged by
globalization. Robert Kuttner, supra, p.
106, 115.

[202] The
Congressional Budget Office has estimated that it would take two years to spend
just 60% of $37 billion from the last infra-structure bill. The Economist,
12/13/2008, p. 34; if Rs attack for promoting big government they’ll lose
because the financial crisis has discredited their economic theories and the
racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to for
Gingrich in 1993. Krugman NYT 1/5/09

[203] Carefully
evaluate the ‘shovel ready’ state and local projects, some of which are ready
to go because they have been drawn up, previously reviewed and rejected. The
Economist, 12/13/2008, p, 34

[204] Barack
Obama proposes creating an infrastructure bank to help finance transport
projects, supporting high speed rail and investing in subways and buses. $1.6t
is needed, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers, to bring just
the existing infrastructure into good repair, excluding future needs. We must
invest more than 2.4% on infrastructure when Europe is investing 5% and China
is investing 9% Our ports are choked, flights delayed, dismal commutes cost
more and all this wastes 4.2b hours and 2lb gallons of wasted gas in addition
to $9.3b in lost productivity. . The Economist, June 28th 2008 p. 35

[205] ibid
p. 91, p. 136; Europe actually manages to provide MORE JOBS, as well as better
jobs, for its population than the U.S. does. Europe beat free-market America by
about 2 percentage points in providing jobs for the entire population. And of
course the working conditions, wages, vacation days, and social protections are
far superior in Europe, even in France.. NOT ONLY ARE WAGES FAR MORE EQUAL,
Europeans receive universal health coverage, and public opinion polls show that
Europeans are more satisfied with their medical care than Americans. Child care
and prekindergarten are financed socially in most of Europe. The Nordic
countries provide generous paid maternity benefits. And virtually all of the
higher average U.S. gross domestic product is accounted

[206] create
a million new jobs to free us from Arab oil (see fn 40) by creating alternative
fuels, requiring cars be more efficient; changing food crops into growth of
products that can be turned into diesel fuel; curtailing overall and adjust
energy use SO WE WON’T NEED FOREIGN OIL WITHIN 10 YEARS; re-training workers
displaced by outsourcing means training older and less educated from one
industry, typically done better by employers than the state; (follow Amory
Lovins “Playing The Oil Endgame”)

[207] Don’t Paralyze the
Peacekeepers, New York Times, 2/10/2012, p.A23

[208] Bank fraud occurred; 1043
S&Ls were closed, costing the
taxpayers $153 billion; Chicago AGs 4.5m re problem; 1873 was first such fraud when bankers and
investors made the taxpayers bail them out; 1929 Glass–Steagall (and FDIC) was
passed; in 1989 Reagan/Bush S&L bailout occurred (which was larger than the
recent bailout); The causes, under
President H.W. Bush (father) resulted from the phase-out and eventual
elimination in the early 1980s of the Federal Reserve’s Regulation which caused
increasing costs of thrift liabilities relative to many fixed-rate assets and adversely
affected industry profitability, capital; state and federal deregulation of
depository institutions, which allowed thrifts to enter new but riskier loan
markets, the deregulation of the thrift industry without an accompanying
increase in examination resources (for some years examiner resources actually
declined),reduced regulatory capital requirements, which allowed thrifts to use
alternative accounting procedures to
increase reported capital levels, excessive chartering of new thrifts during
the 1980s and the withdrawal in 1986 of
federal tax laws (enacted in 1981) that benefited commercial real- estate investments. FDIC
Banking Review; The Cost
of the Savings and Loan Crisis: Truth and Consequences by Timothy Curry and
Lynn Shibut*, after 2000; Lenders were and are unable to provide ownership
documents to any new buyer since the ownership of those premises were spread
among innumerable, difficult to trace, partial owners (the ‘transferors’ being
insured by the failed AIG so THEY would not lose by gambling with funds which
were not theirs). Some of their ‘earnings’ from these deals is in the Gran
Cayman, outside the reach of federal authorities. WA AG, KC Prosecutor
presentation 2/8/12, MDC

[211] The
shareholders, bondholders and creditors, not the deceived, should lose by the
banks’ knowing risky business practices.

[212]
NYT, 2/18/2009 p. 1 This bets that the ‘saved’ won’t walk away (only 1-2%
walked away in Boston) which seems a small potential cost since only 6.4% in
Boston went into foreclosure. Of course it all depends on whether the Boston
experience is repeated now. The President is trying to focus on those
homeowners who would certainly lose their homes without government help and
will help some undewater homeowners refinance their mortgages, but that won’t e
the emphasis. Any bank that does not negotiate as expected would lose favor,
and possibly they need it if they are the ones who’ve ALREADY GOTTEN FEDERAL
BAILOUT MONEY. This helps the responsible buyers, the deceived borrowers, but
not the speculators buying for resale nor the lenders with culpable deceptions.

[213] ‘passing the trash’ was the
wording used by a banker about their transmission of loans to others.

[230] Failure
to agree on domestic standards for mobile phones is seen as a principal reason
why foreign firms were able to capture both technological and market leads over
their U.S. competitors. p. 114

[240] Until
now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho
fixation on “average tonnage” and “record harvests” but we don’t have to rely
on capital, chemistry and machines In fact, small farms are the most productive
on earth. A four-acre farm n the U.S. nets, on average, $1400 per acre, vs
39/acre for larger farms. NYT, Sunday Opinion, 5/11/08, p. I3.

The ideal
current model is the EU: a single monetary policy for the 16 euro area Member
States, combined with coordinated national fiscal policies has boosted
cross-border trade, financial integration and investments. Budgetary discipline
has improved significantly thanks to the rules bases Stability and Growth pact.
The responsiveness of this system has just been demonstrated as:

1)EU
leaders rapidly produced a rescue plan that allows governments to guarantee
interbank lending, provide short-term liquidity, and buy into banks to increase
their capital;

[253] savings
(for investment in starting new and expanding existing businesses) will rise
because share prices, housing costs will decrease as mortgage rates level off
and decreased appreciation of housing will make it less appealing.

U.S. is
increasingly dependent on capital from the rest of the world to finance
investment. At the same time, the decreased national savings rate---and the
increase in consumer spending that it implies, are paid for with increased
consumer DEBT---accompanies a rise in U.S. imports; higher stock and real
estate prices do not free up resources to increase investment in BUSINESS
capital; the relatively rapid increase in consumer spending is the primary
reason or the large trade deficit and the associated capital inflows; As
consumer spending falls, GDP and employment will also decline. This decline
will last until net exports increase by an equal amount. Foreign Affairs,
May/June 2006, Feldstein, Martin, “The Return of Saving”, p 87

[254] Despite
the popular misconception, globalized economics have helped (by 2000 the
developing world produced 42% of the globe’s income, up from 29% in 1950
Atlantic, April 2007, p. 58)

[258] support
growth, a values issue, since Rs won 97 of the 100 fastest growing counties

[259] *
When Reagan fired the air traffic controllers de-unionization was already well
along Reich, p.80

[260] According
to data from the OECD ad the Luxembourg Income Study, the U.S. has at least
TWICE THE DEGREE OF INEQUALITY of most of Europe, as well as far greater
economic insecurity, and the gap is widening. The increases in labor market
inequality---wage differentials and deregulation---are the biggest single
source of Europe’s widening inequality. P. 214

During the
postwar boom, wage and labor regulation, such as minimum-wage and
prevailing-wage laws, unemployment compensation, and legal recognition of trade
unions not only raised wages directly, they served to increase the bargaining
power of other individual workers and organized labor on behalf of the whole
umbrella of social protections. The new commitment by the state to maintaining
full employment recreated a relatively tight labor market in which employers
had to pay decently to hire qualified workers. Today’s dwindling share of union
representation is not the result of workers deciding that unions are not for
them. It is the consequence of a no-holds-barred attack by corporations on
unions, with the complicity of government. A recent Hart poll shows that 53% of
America’s nonunion workers would like to be represented by a union. But in
2004, just 80,000 workers succeeded in organizing one---because management so
efficiently and costlessly fires workers who sign union cards, IN FLAGRANT
VIOLATION OF THE WAGNER ACT. Even in an era of all-out war on unions, the
economic advantages of being a union member are impressive. According to the
Bureau of labor Statistics, the average union wage premium is 28%. Fully 73% of
union members have defined-benefit pensions, compared to 16% of non-union
workers. And 92% of workers kin unionized companies receive employer-provided
health insurance compared to 68% of non-union workers (whose policies are also
often inferior). Lest the reader conclude that all these workers are in
declining, old-economy companies whose generous compensation policies are
renderings them uncompetitive, the same differences hold up if we compare the
average hourly pay of workers in the low-wage service economy, the one sector
where unionization is growing. Kuttner, p. 54,5

6ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now) organizes for employees
5 of nonunion workers (*whose policies are also often inferior). Lest the
reader conclude that all these works are in declining, old-economy companies
whose generous compensation policies are rendering them uncompetitive, the same
differences hold up if we compare the average hourly pay of workers in the
low-wage service economy, the one sector where unionization is growing. Robert
Kuttner, p. 55

Denmark enjoys new economic dynamism and a lower
unemployment rate than the U.S., land has not sacrificed broad social benefits
or income equality by a series of reforms, called flexicurity, which combined
reduced labor regulation with increased outlays on training for displaced
individuals. p. 213

[263] change
labor laws making it easier for employees to organize and negotiate better
terms. Ask a small transfer tax on sales of shares of stock, in order to slow
the movement of capital ever so slightly so people and communities have a bit
more time to adapt to changing circumstances. Put in “circuit-breakers” that
prevent a large, profitable company from laying off more than a certain
proportion of the workers in a particular community during the course of a
year.. Extend unemployment insurance combined with wage insurance and job
training to ease the pain for workers caught in downdrafts of deregulation or
trade. Trade treaties should require all participating nations to allow their
citizens to organize unions and establish minimum wages that are half their
median wages. Support paid family leave,
so workers can upgrade their skills. Reich, Robert B.Supercapitalism, Alfred B.
Knopf, New York, p. 128

[264] Corporations
aren’t us! Why do they get ‘health care’ when we don’t;

[265] NYT 5/16/07: outsourcing is not yet high
enough to affect wages and immigration only cause. 10% of the change in wages.
What we need is the technical education for OUR citizens so Americans can get
the 10 to 14% higher, rising wages of the jobs requiring technical competence
the immigrants can’t do, especially since our citizens have said they don’t
want the immigrants’ jobs. It’s especially important because technology is
getting ahead of all of us so we have to set ourselves up to get more education
unless we want the immigrants’ jobs we say we don’t want.

Global
capitalism works wonderfully to enlarge the world economy but democracy becomes
less and less effective since the gains have gone to the well off, not the
workers. We must bring back salary and wage increases that exceed inflation,
fair taxation, well-funded public education, trade unions to restore the
strength of the people, not the corporations. The more equal incomes of the
1950s (every income group and social class gained ground, inequality of income
and *wealth declined, and a far larger middle class emerged; the top 1% had
dropped from 19% to 7% of total personal income and more equal after taxes
since the top earners paid a marginal income tax rate of 91%.Reich, Robert,
Supercapitalism, Alfred B. Knopf, New York, p.37) must be paid again as they
were then. Regulation stabilized industry, maintained jobs and wages, and
protected the economic bases of communities where regulated industries were
headquartered or did business. It also sought to weigh industry’s need for
profits against the public’s need for safe, fair, and reliable service. Supra,
p. 7, 25. You deserve the peace of knowing you will continue to have a job that
will support you and your family . Unions,or government, have to give you
pensions and health care because you CAN VOTE FOR THEM, but business won’t
provide because it loses money since now so many competitors may undercut them.
As jobs and incomes grow less secure, public safety nets become more essential.
As companies are pressured to show profits, tougher measures are needed to
guard public health, safety, the environment, and human rights against the
possibility that executives may feel compelled to cut corners. Reich, supra. P.
126

[274] Find
ways to recover the money deceived homebuyers paid for homes when financial
houses knew they were ‘passing trash’ from subprime loans since their borrowers
couldn’t afford the homes sold when wages were not increasing. (Offer rent
assistance if fall behind instead of PURCHASE assistance which spurs the belief
that poor people can AFFORD to buy a home beyond their reach.

[275]But maybe Clinton de-regulated telecommunications and
banking “for too long, through both Democratic and Republican administrations,
the system has been rigged against everyday American by the lobbyists that Wall
Street uses to get its way” New Yorker

[278] Most
Americans believe that the average worker “has to work harder to earn a decent
living” today than he did twenty or thirty years earlier. But the TOP TENTH OF
A PERCENT SAW ITS INCOME RISE FIVE TIMES, AND THE TOP .01% OF AMERICANS IS
SEVEN TIMES RICHER THAN THEY WERE IN 1973. Krugman, Paul, p. 128; by 2001 CSO
pay had risen to 350 times what the typical worker earned Reich,
Supercapitalism, Alfred B. Knopf, New York, p.108. The bosses have taken
productivity wage increases, and kept them themselves while two-thirds of
Americans have lost earnings or are getting no increases when everything costs
more. Robert Kuttner, The Squandering of America, Alfred A. Knopf, New York,
2007, p. 4; see also The Economist, February 2, 2008, p. 86, which indicates
the American economy barely grew at the end of 2007.

[279] U.S.
has become one of the lowest cost producers of steel in the world (due to fixed
price contracts with American producers) which may mean increased productivity
and the wage gap is narrowing. Seattle Times 5/26/08, p A3

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the patient protection and
affordable care act includes health insurance market reforms that will bring
immediate benefits to millions of americans, including those who currently have
coverage. the following benefits will be available in the first year after enactment
of the patient protection and affordable care act.

access to affordable coverage
for the uninsured with pre-existing conditions

the patient protection and
affordable care act will provide $5 billion in immediate federal support for a
new program to provide affordable coverage to uninsured americans with
pre-existing conditions.

coverage under this program
will continue until new exchanges are operational.

re-insurance for retiree
health benefit plans

the patient protection and
affordable care act will create immediate access to re-insurance for employer
health plans providing coverage for early retirees.

this re-insurance will help
protect coverage while reducing premiums for employers and retirees.

closing the coverage gap in
the medicare (part d) drug benefit

the patient protection and
affordable care act will reduce the size of the "donut hole” by raising
the ceiling on the initial coverage period by $500 in 2010.

the patient protection and
affordable care act will also guarantee 50 percent price discounts on
brand-name drugs and biologics purchased by low and middle-income beneficiaries
in the coverage gap.

small business tax credits

the patient protection and
affordable care act will offer tax credits to small businesses to make employee

tax credits of up to 50
percent of premiums will be available to firms that choose to offer coverage.

extension of dependent
coverage for young adults

the patient protection and
affordable care act will require insurers to permit children to stay on family
policies until age 26.

free prevention benefits

the patient protection and
affordable care act will require coverage of prevention and wellness benefits
and exempt these benefits from deductibles and other cost-sharing requirements
in public and private insurance coverage.

no arbitrary limits on
coverage

the patient protection and
affordable care act will prohibit insurers from imposing lifetime limits on
benefits and will restrict the use of annual limits.

protection from rescissions of
existing coverage

the patient protection and
affordable care act will stop insurers from rescinding insurance when claims
are filed, except in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of
material fact.

prohibits discrimination based
on salary

the patient protection and
affordable care act will prohibit group health plans from establishing any
eligibility rules for health care coverage that have the effect of
discriminating in favor of higher wage employees.

ensuring value for premium
payments

the patient protection and
affordable care act will establish standards for insurance overhead to ensure
that premiums are spent on health benefits.

the patient protection and
affordable care act will also require public disclosure of overhead and benefit
spending and require premium rebates for insurers that exceed established
standards for overhead expenses.

public access to comparable
information on insurance options

the patient protection and
affordable care act will enable creation of a new website to provide
information on and facilitate informed consumer choice of insurance options.

health insurance consumer
information

the patient protection and
affordable care act will provide assistance to states in establishing offices
of health insurance consumer assistance or health insurance ombudsman programs
to assist individuals with the filing of complaints and appeals, enrollment in
a health plan, and, eventually, to assist consumers with resolving problems
with tax credit eligibility.

clear summaries, without the
fine print

the patient protection and
affordable care act will require insurance companies to outline coverage
options using a simple and standard format that enables consumers to make an
apples-to-apples comparison when they are choosing their health insurance plan.

appeals process

under the patient protection
and affordable care act, all health plans will implement an effective appeals
process for appeals of coverage determinations and claims.

administrative simplification

under the patient protection
and affordable care act, all health plans will adopt uniform descriptions of
plan benefits and appeals procedures and will use uniform forms and claims
processing processes to reduce costs.

We
tackled long term spending growth, website for long term regulatory
reform started July 1, 2010, on time so insurance must give small businesses
$250 payments sent to people caught in donut hole non-payment for drugs,
eliminated discrimination for pre-existing conditions, 27 states are starting
high-risk insurance pools for uninsured with health problems, federal coverage
for states which do not have their own pools started on August 1, 2010,

Bruce
Bartlett, Ronald Reagan’s domestic policy advisor and George H.W. Bush’s Deputy
Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy says he got it all wrong on health
care. His candid assessment of the downfall of modern Republicanism and its
central core of pretend conservatism as published in a must-read article in the
December, 2012 issue of American Conservative. The confessional includes, among
many on-target money quotes, this one: “Living in the Fox News cocoon, most
Republicans had no clue that they were losing [in 2012] or that their ideas
were both stupid and politically unpopular.” Bartlett begins by detailing his
decades-long list of unquestionably rock-solid conservative credentials, all of
which have earned him exactly nothing from today’s clueless, brain-addled,
incurably propagandized Fox “News” “conservative” crowd, which tossed him
“under a bus”. “To this day,” Bartlett writes, “I don’t think they understand
that my motives were to help them avoid the permanent decline that now seems
inevitable…” “Revenge of the Reality-Based Community: My life on the Republican
right includes his frank admissions that he was wrong about Keynesian economics,
as he learned while researching for a 2007 book initially meant to describe it
as a dead economic theory. “After careful research along these lines, Keynes
had been 100 percent right in the 1930s. George W. Bush’s Great Recession made
clear that “We needed Keynesian policies again.” “Annoyingly,” he says, “I
found myself joined at the hip to Paul Krugman, whose analysis was identical to
my own. I had previously viewed Krugman as an intellectual enemy and attacked
him rather colorfully in an old column that he still remembers.” “For the
record,” he generously offers, “no one has been more correct in his analysis
and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman. The blind
hatred for him on the right simply pushed me further away from my old allies
and comrades.” Brooks has been “banned from Fox News” and fired from a right
wing think tank for his various acts of Republican heresy and there has been
‘epistemic closure’ among conservatives — living in their own bubble where
nonsensical ideas circulate with no contradiction.” His “first exposure” to the
Republicans’ Fox-fueled jihad of self-defeat, he explains, occurred while
working on his 2006 book, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and
Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.States helped by hundreds of millions
of dollars to help health care delivery and oversight of insurance company
performance, though long term financing still on hold by Congress NYT 9/23/2010
p. A31

Changes
to be made in 2011

1)tax
credits on track for Changes to propose for 2011 (The Nation, 5/5/2010):

2)Change requiring only 60% coverage from
participating plans

3)Push
to replace the privatized Medicare drug coverage program with a fully public
plan that would use its bargaining power to force down drug prices by about
40%.“

4)Eliminate
entirely the overpayments to HMOs and phase out investor-owned health providers
that deliver inferior care at inflated prices;

5)Advocate
on behalf of Safety Net Hospitals;

6)Pass
public funding of political campaigns (FENA, SB562) to reduce the influence,
through campaign contributions and push for tougher regulation of Big Pharma.

7)Expose
and agitate against insurance firm’s abuse of customers and outrageous incomes
paid to their executives;

8)Allow
undocumented immigrants to buy insurance in the new
exchanges and allow green-card holders to receive publicly subsidized insurance
for these first five years;

9) Work with state-based single-payer groups (VT, CA, MD, MN)

The Cost of Doing Nothing”
NYT, Wk in Review, 2/28/2010, p. 1 would have been:

a)unrelenting
rise of medical costs outpace the growth in the overall economy, increase
faster than the average paycheck and increase in health care premiums which
would be a substantial deterioration in what we have;

b)fewer
individuals and businesses would have been
able to afford insurance coverage. More of everyone’s dollar would have gone to
health care, and government programs like Medicare and Medicaid would have
struggled to find the money to operate. Typical family coverage, which cost
$13,000/year was expected to double, to $24,000/year by 2020. That would have
increased the uninsured by more than a million a year. It would have cramped our economic growth. As many as
275,000 would have died prematurely. If President Nixon’s plan had passed, the
United States might b spending a trillion dollars a year less than it does now
and President Clinton’s plan would have reduced spending by some $400 billion a
year.

$32 million
now uninsured will have coverage, and must pay the premiums which will also
provide the remaining money necessary to support the whole system for everyone.

The health reform act is not: 1) a government
takeover of the nation’s health care system since all those with employer
sponsored health care may keep it and those now self-insured will have the
option of private coverage (voters don’t realize that 46% of all health care is
NOW PUBLIC so the difference is iinsignificant);

2) a budget buster since it will reduce
future spending by over $1 trillion by 2029. AARP, April 2010, p. 3

65% regard immediate action on health care costs as
“very important’; medical innovation (the number of new treatments proposed,
not costs generally) is the problem; Ron Sims, County Executive has provided a
model as he gathered employers, providers and insurers to improve quality of
health care and reduce costs Every major religion teaches its followers to care
for those who are less fortunate. But we’re 37th worldwide in
overall health system effectiveness.

The national
deficit would decrease by used of a single payer health care plan would have
been better (essentially improving and strengthening Medicare by expanding it
to all). Dr. Margaret Flowers (congressional fellow for Physicians for a
National Health Program) presented to the National Commission on Fiscal
Responsibility and Reform, June 30 hearing. She also supported reduction of
cots by evidence-based remedy to control. When compared to health care in other
advanced nations, the United States excels in only one area- the amount of
money spent per capita per year. Despite our high spending, the U.S. leaves a
third of the population either uncovered or underinsured thus vulnerable to
financial ruin. Medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy and foreclosure
in our nation despite the fact that most families declaring medical
bankruptcy had insurance when they began incurring the debt. Our health outcomes are relatively poor, placing us 37th in the world,
and we rank the highest in preventable deaths, over 100,000 preventable deaths
per year, when compared to other advanced nations. It is clear we are getting
poor value in return for our health care dollar. Health care costs, which are
rising 2.5% faster than our GDP, are a leading driver of our financial deficit.
In fact, if our health care costs were comparable to
those in other advanced nations, which provide nearly universal health care
with better outcomes, we would currently experience a budget surplus. The recent health legislation, misleadingly titled the Patient
Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) lacks proven cost controls and is
predicted to cause U.S. health care costs to rise faster than if there had been
no reform at all (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services, April 2010)
despite continuing to leave out tens of millions. Worse, given the impact of
health care costs, members of this commission may attempt to decrease the
deficit by cutting our public health insurance programs, Medicaid and Medicare.
However, doing this would be a mistake because it would increase poverty, worsen
health outcomes and increase costs. Since its enactment nearly 45 years ago, Medicare has substantially lowered poverty among the elderly. Studies show that health disparities in the U.S. start decreasing when
our population reaches the age of 65. And the cost of health care per
beneficiary is rising more slowly for those on Medicare than for those with
private health insurance. Medicaid and Medicare have not
caused our rising health care costs but are victims of our fragmented and
failed market-based model of health care financing. Shifting the cost of health care from the taxpayer to the patient will
not magically make these heath care costs disappear or become sustainable. The
solution to our economic crisis is to jettison the costly failed market model of
health care and adopt a publicly financed and independently delivered national
improved Medicare for All. This is commonly known as “single payer”. A national
improved Medicare for All system has myriad benefits: administrative savings of approximately $400 billion per year,
which is enough to provide comprehensive high quality health care to all who
are uninsured and underinsured; ability to negotiate
for pharmaceutical prices as a monopsony which would lower costs by about 40%
and bring our prices in line with those of other advanced nations. Inherent
cost controls of global budgeting for health facilities, negotiated fees, bulk purchasing and rational,
rather than profit-driven, allocation of capital expenditures and health
resources; ability to identify outliers and develop quality improvement tools;
enhance the competitiveness of U.S. products in international markets; liberate
our population to pursue advanced education or entrepreneurial enterprises;
allow older workers to retire which would increase job opportunities for our
younger workers; stimulate the economy because families would have more money
for discretionary spending; improve the health, and therefore the productivity,
of our workforce; eliminate bankruptcy and foreclosure due to medical debt;
eliminate the spend-down required for those who need long-term care; provide
true health security to our population so that nobody has to choose between
necessary medical care and other necessities such as housing, food, education
and clothing; given these multiple economic benefits – and I have not begun to
describe the ways in which national improved Medicare for All would improve
patient choice and quality of health care- it is no surprise that the single
payer approach is supported by the majority of those in the U.S. and the
majority of American physicians, 70% voted not to cut Medicaid and Medicare

Private health
insurance is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. There is a steady trend in
fewer being enrolled in employee-sponsored health plans. This is expected to
increase under PPACA as businesses have an incentive to drop insurance benefits
and pay the lower cost penalty.

There is a
steady trend in people choosing high deductible plans which leave them
financially vulnerable in their time of need. As people enter the individual
market, those with health conditions will find it difficult to afford adequate
insurance.

The trends show
increase in those who are uninsured and underinsured. It will become worse
under PPACA since billons of public dollars will be used to subsidize rising
private insurance premiums for policies that cover fewer and fewer services.
The result will be a flow of patient and public dollars into the coffers of private insurance corporations
with declining return in terms of health
care. This trend is not sustainable.

The alternative
scenario of a national improved Medicare for All will save lives and save
money. National improved Medicare for All will place our nation on the path of
becoming one of the best health systems in the world.

This commission has the ability to
recommend creating a financially sustainable universal health system.

8/20/2010 Public Citizen, Health Letter, July, 2010,
p. 6. The current move for ‘single payer’ (McDermott) is 128 sponsors for the
“robust” Public Option Act (Seattle Times 7/23/2010, B2) but the previous
inability to get enough Democratic support to avoid Senate threatened
filibuster prevented single-payer and will be worse under the 2011 Senate. The
POA would set up a ‘Medicare-like public insurance plan that would compete with
private carriers lower the deficit $53b between 2014 and 2019 (CBO)) attract
1.3m, a third, of the previously covered by insurance companies (to deter them
from raising rates?), lower premiums 50% and pay providers a flat Medicare +
5%.

In 2004 long term goals for better health care were:
1) under PPACA, promote equity in the global economic system e.g. restricting
the power of transnational corporations and multilateral lending institutions,
restructuring trade policies to promote fair trade, canceling the debt of the ;poorest countries, and taxing
international transactions (the “Tobin Tax”); 2) Restrict or ban international
trade in industries whose products are designed or designed to kill, such as
military hardware, including land mines, and tobacco; 3) promote national
responsibility for the provision of health care to all in both north and south,
resist privatization of health care and support national health care systems;.
4) Assure that food, clean water, and other basic needs are seen as basic human
rights and protected from profit-oriented exposition; 5) Redesign and enforce
an international essential drug policy that will regulate prices for the supply
of, and research on drugs so that basic medicines can be provided to all who
need them; 6) Include worker health and well-being whenever issues of
industrial; production or trade are discussed. Continue the international
pressure to ban sweatshop labor and promote fair trade practices; and 7) Demand
environmental protection for this planet earth, requiring control of toxic
wastes, clean and reduced energy use, and other similar measures.

“A
Public Option Isn’t a Curse, or a Cure”, NYT OPINION, by Richard Thaler raises
problems with public option, calling it an insurance option run by the
government: it will challenge or defeat private insurance if it GETS subsidies,
it will impair private companies ability to complete if it is given power to
impose special deals with suppliers like hospitals and drug companies and if it
is to compete with privates it, too, will have marketing and other
administrative costs Medicare doesn’t have.

The
largest question in health care reform is can we avoid ideological decisions
for the market in favor of empirical outcomes? Europe caps budgets on health
care, puts price controls and has a more modest view in the medical profession
about what constitute appropriate treatments. A Theory of Justice, John Rawls,
and Setting Limits, What Kind of Life” “: The Troubled Dream of Life” and False
Hopes, by Daniel Callahan; as well as
Angela A. Wasunna, “Medicine and the Market”

[282] The architecture of the
Affordable Care Act is based on conservative, not liberal, ideas about
individual responsibility and the power of market forces. The president's program extends the current
health care system (mostly employer-based coverage, administered by commercial
health insurers including fee-for-service doctors and hospitals - by removing
our health care system’s biggest barriers to a competitive marketplace. The
future health care law requires insurance so taxpayers won’t have to continue
to pay, by law, what our uninsured cost us taxpayers at the Emergency Room. It
outlaws discrimination against those who want treatment but cannot get it when private
insurance refuses to cover people with
scary medical histories. The mandate is about personal responsibility - a
hallmark of conservative thought- but providing help paying for insurance for
needy potential patients who now get free ER, or no, care – a conservative
value, particularly when it lowers overall societal cost and provides more
efficient health care. It subsidizes only people who cannot afford insurance so
they may get it and lower the cost for the taxpayer for their health care by
covering the insurer with universal health care premium payment. Conservatives,
at the beginning, and Mr. Obama thought it was a good idea. Exchanges, another idea formulated by conservatives and
supported by Republican governors and legislators across the country for years,
is pro-market, frees up buyers and sellers (no private or public bureaucracy),
provides your care only excluding less proven treatments, so that it will be
less expensive than now and tells you the cost up front. If we give it a
chance, the new system will cut 26% of the cost of health care insurance
premiums. Obama's reform plans are creating a health insurance exchange, a
one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.

We’ll
group teams of doctors and nurses by phone; assign small teams and get
comparability information regarding treatments. That will build trust when we
do the essential informative outreach to reach out to and include potential
patients through special events, written, broadcast and telephone calls to tell
health care costs and relative benefits.

Further
benefits will come in 2014, after the health care system has time to prepare,
so all plans will have to meet minimal standards and large employers will have
to provide coverage or pay a stiff fine.

Under
today's system, most health insurers (and providers) pay attention to making
money and listen to the wrong people, often for the wrong reasons, with the
maximum cost efficiency coming last. Businesses are free to decide that they
are better off dropping health coverage and letting their employees choose, or
choose not, to cover themselves (and the taxpayers who ‘hold the bag’, paying
for ER visits, if they don’t choose coverage).

[306] Ultimately, the Affordable
Care Act means that increased copayments and deductibles are generally unlikely
for grandfathered plans. While increased deductibles, copayments, and other
out-of-pocket expenses are possible, they are not necessarily likely. In many
cases, some health care expenses will even be fully covered, particularly those
associated with routine care, such as annual checkups or vaccinations. The
Affordable Care Act will also eliminate higher copayments associated with
mental health care or treatment for substance abuse. Premiums for some
open-market plans may increase slightly, but overall expenses are expected to
decrease or increase at a slower rate than they have been. Although
grandfathered plans may not be restricted in the same way that new plans will
be, any changes to their plans must comply with specific regulations. Health
plans may be at risk of losing their grandfathered status if they raise
co-insurance charges, copayments, or deductibles significantly. They may also
lose their grandfathered status if they cut or reduce benefits, lower employer
contributions significantly, or place a cap on benefits. Grandfathered plans
are able to make other changes, however. They can make adjustments to their
subscribers’ costs in order to remain competitive. They can also add benefits
or adjust current benefits. Additionally, grandfathered plans are permitted to
voluntarily comply with new consumer protections or other state or federal
health insurance laws. Sofi Insurance Services

[307] 65%
regard immediate action on health care costs as “very important’; medical
innovation (the number of new treatments proposed, not costs generally) is the
problem; Ron Sims, County Executive has provided a model as he gathered
employers, providers and insurers to improve quality of health care and reduce
costs Every major religion teaches its followers to care for those who are less
fortunate. But we’re 37th worldwide in overall health system
effectiveness.

[308]
Special Message to the Congress Proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance
Plan, 2/6/74

[309] The
lobbyists claim that Canadian and European health care is worse. In
fact, Canadian medicine is more efficient, requiring your doctor to
spend less than 50% of his/her time on paperwork and private insurance has not
been driven out of business and continues today (since 2/3 of Canadians have
SUPPLEMENTAL insurance for dental, eye, prescriptions and private hospital
rooms).Taxes are higher. As here, people wanting much less necessary help are
on waiting lists. Canada does have too few elderly nursing homes. Britain
doesn’t pay for ineffective drugs. Here, Medicare, Medicaid and hospital
emergency rooms, have long waiting lines. And we shouldn’t be writing blank
checks to pharmacies for patented drugs. The
British and Canadian governments try to apportion that national, fixed, number
of budgeted dollars of health spending so that the whole population gets care.
That can mean, alongside other cost-saving measures, longer waits.

[310] Krugman,
NYT, 10/27/09 p. A13; the complexity of implementation of reform in 1/5th
of America’s economy has been delayed issuing essential regulations and many
state governments remain unco-operative. Some states have not chosen to expand
Medicaid, and if they don’t, those with incomes below 100 of the poverty line
will not qualify for subsidies on the exchanges. Missouri voters passed a
ballot measure to prevent their governor from moving forward But HHS has
started to reward hospitals for providing good care. The Economist, January 5,
2013, p. 21

[311] Medicare-for-All
(Single-Payer) Reform Would Be Major Stimulus for Economy with 2.6 Million New
Jobs, $17 Billion in Business Revenue, $100 Billion in Wages placard at rally

[312] Medicare would still be able
to meet 88 percent of its obligations even in 2085. Social Security is fully
funded for another twenty years and could pay 75 percent of its benefits after
that. Obama’s recent reduction of payments to Medicare was recovery for waste,
abuse and overpayment, not a cut in Medicare. Your current government program,
Medicare, charges 27% less for doing the plan than insurance companies. We
should thank the government, not avoid it.

[313] By 2019 about 24 million
people will have insurance through exchanges, and 80% who can’t make the
premiums will have federal subsidies to make it affordable. The next
regulations will lay out the essential benefits required for each plan. The
plan will give our people the same insurance choices as members of
Congress. They have taken very good care
of themselves and now will take care of us.

[314] “Medicare“…e-based
medical procedure. Those units sole role is receiving “payments” and paying
medical providers. Inclusion of business is essential to buy compliance, rather
than holdouts, after negotiation.

Current
Medicare spends 98% of its funds on actual medical care. In contrast, Aetna
spends less than 80% of each dollar in health insurance premiums on medical
care. The other 20% goes into profits, marketing and administrative expenses.
Massachusetts’ law requires everyone who can afford it to pay $295 for health
care coverage. They’ll help a little with the old families and others who can’t
afford that. Making all who can pay covers them, and, overall, this will cause
people to prevent severe illness by going to lower cost, walk-in, clinics or
places with lower prices who refuse to do insurance. Currently, the differences
cost the U.S. an unnecessary 18,000 lives per year…6 9/11s…according to the
National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine.

The
alternatives are to reform Medicare by moving toward managed competition by
requiring all plans chosen by patients to compete for customers on both price
and quality, like the FEHBP.

The
Maryland alternative is an 8%-of-payroll-for-health-care by large businesses,
abolition of the existing fee-for-service Medicare and Medicaid programs and
enrollment of all Americans in a universal health insurance system called the
Medical Security System (MSS). Every October the MSS would provide
individualized vouchers to be used to purchase health insurance for the
following calendar year based on the recipient’s expected health expenditures
over the calendar years. All Americans would receive health care and the
government could limit its total voucher expenditure to what the nation could
afford. The plan is also progressive. The poor, who are more prone to illness
than the rich, would receive higher vouchers on average. And all the tax breaks
going to the rich in the form of non-taxed health insurance premium payments
should vanish.

Add some
way to limit the 60% of the current health care dollar going to the last six
months of life. Thirty states are considering Maryland’s “Fair Share”; Andy
Stern, SEIU, hopes Wal-Mart (one of the BETTER providers) requesting national
health-care would cause a rush of other companies already buried in health-care
costs, to be joined by governors burdened by Medicaid costs (states pay 40%)
and cheered by unhealthy workers currently suffering discrimination to the
right answer. All this is forced by the fact that health care costs are rising
at 3 times the rate of inflation; automakers in 2004 said they liked Kerry‘s
health care plan; Republicans could bring themselves to join since it isn’t a
government plan.

[316] Washington’s work on
Affordable Insurance Exchanges (online marketplaces where individuals and small
businesses can buy coverage starting
in 2014, Washington State has received $23.9 million in grants for research,
planning, information technology development, and implementation of Affordable
Insurance Exchanges) and $1 million in planning grants. This grant provides
Washington the resources to build, operate and govern a better health insurance
marketplace. It increases support for community
health centers, including the 223 existing community health centers in
Washington. It strengthens partnerships with Washington to support public
health and crack down on fraud ($133.7 million). It eliminates expensive
fee-for-service payments forever.

[321]
doctors ought not to be paid to use tests not crucial to a patient’s health
since they increase overall health care spending, especially since no one
checks and authorizes using them. It’s better to pay doctors for choosing
services, such as researching different treatment options or offering advice to
help patients get better without treatment. Move toward paying doctors fixed
salaries. NYT July 29, 2007, Week in Review, p. 3

[324] For the ‘donut hole’ on drug
costs you used to have to cover, federal money starts plugging the gap so Uncle
Sam covers 2.5 percent of the costs and the patient covers only the remaining
47.5 %, decreasing the patient’s costs. The patient’s share of lower, generic, drug
prescriptions in the donut is reduced in 2013 with the federal government
picking up increasing amounts of the
bill. But beware the lobbying to cut this benefit we got on generics. For big
taxpayers, it costs more for unreimbursed medical expenses. But there’s no
increase for people over 65 for tax years 2013-2016. Better off wage earners
pay higher Medicare bills. Employers who have been getting federal subsidies to
continue retiree drug coverage lose those subsidies as a tax deduction starting Jan. 1.
No big layoffs will occur. The government will increase the number of
optional treatments and that will increase the sales of medical devices to the
same people. Medicaid will then
provide a one percentage point increase in federal matching payments to states in
which Medicaid programs cover certain preventive services listed in the U.S.
Preventive Services Task Force without requiring patients to share any of the
costs. Higher rates will be paid to primary care doctors in 2013 and 2014, fully
funded by the federal government; CMS (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid
Services) will share the cost.

[325] Development of stem cells may
lead to pure cultures of cells for the early testing of drugs. By induced
pluripotent stem (ips) cells. The Economist, January 12, 2013, p. 68

[326] Drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline,
Avandia, “clear evidence from a large international study that…Avandia is more
effective than standard therapies," Financial connections between the
drugmaker and the research that each of the 11 authors had received money from
the company, four were employees and held company stock. The other seven were
academic experts who had received grants or consultant fees from the firm.
Missed hints in review of 4000 patients of a danger that the drug raised the
risk of heart attacks, 83,000 heart attacks and deaths. 73 articles. Of those
articles, 60 were funded by a pharmaceutical company, 50 were co-written by
drug company employees and 37 had a lead author, typically an academic, who had
previously accepted outside compensation from the sponsoring drug company in
the form of consultant pay, grants or speaker fees. the growing role of
industry money in research. Last year, the industry spent $39 billion on
research in the United States while NIH spent $31 billion. part of a high-risk
quest for profits, and over the past decade corporate interference has
repeatedly muddled the nation's drug science, sometimes with potentially lethal
consequences. On Vioxx, Avandia and Celebrex obscured the dangerous side effects.

Five
years later, journal editors reported discovering that the authors had omitted
key incidences of heart troubles, creating "misleading" conclusions
about the drug's safety. Before the drug was pulled from the market, according
to a review by an FDA investigator, it caused an extra 27,000 heart attacks and
cardiac-related deaths. Other industry-funded papers published in NEJM have led
to conclusions that were later contradicted. Research published in NEJM
regarding bestsellers such as the anemia drug Epogen and heart drug Natrecor
has been challenged later by studies performed by other researchers. The odds
of coming to a conclusion favorable to the industry are 3.6 times greater in
research sponsored by the industry than The researchers even warned one another
against sharing the results of the preliminary study. Per Sr Mng request, these
data should not see the light of day to anyone outside of GSK," said an
internal e-mail that was widely reported after it turned up in the Senate
investigation. the ADOPT trial was not
really designed to assess heart risks. For one thing, it excluded people most
at risk of heart trouble, making it harder to spot a problem. Moreover,
investigators did not have a group of doctors validate reports of heart
attacks, as is customary because they can be difficult to detect. Finally,
about 40 percent of patients dropped out of the trial. Glaxo later conducted an
examination of records from more than 14,000 patients and concluded that
Avandia raised the risk of coronary blood flow problems by about 30 percent,
the Senate investigators said. Raised the risk by 43 percent and of death from
heart problems by 64 percent.

Settlements for fraud against Pharma are at
record high; More evidence of the damaging, expensive results of privatizing
Medicare (Public Citizen Health Letter 11/12)

[327] Safeguards
for privacy will outlaw the sale of any personal health information , except
with the patients permission, allow patients to control sensitive information
(psychotherapy, abortions, tests for AIDS), give the right to know who’s
getting the information and require telling the patient whenever their information was lost, stolen or used for an
unauthorized purpose and allowing recovery of damages. Maybe the method of
preserving privacy of sensitive information is to require that such information
be kept separate from their original medical record. (For more on benefits, see
the New York Times 8/26/12, p. 14 ).

[333]
Washington residents get evidence based standard of care 75% of the time
(Washington State Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Costs and Access)

[334] New
York Times, August 19, 2009, p.A17 Patients are frightened and vulnerable.
Doctor fees are a mystery. We should set limits of 150% of the amount Medicare
would pay on use of any care which is not part of their insurance network (in
which the patient would only responsible for deductibles and co-payments).
Costs for the same procedure is unknown and varies widely: from $681 to
$26,000, from $638 to $15,820 and from $700 to $7000.

[342]America is currently number 54
in fairness per the WHO ranking of 191 countries. All
the other industrialized countries provide health care for everyone at a
reasonable cost. T.R. Reid, The Healing of America: A Global Quest
for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, flap

We have a
rotten system for financing care. We shall end inability to obtain treatment
when they have too much money to qualify for health care under welfare, but too
little money to pay for the drugs and doctors needed to stay alive (Nikki White
died from complications of the failing American health care system) p. 1. More than 20,000 Americans die in the prime
of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they
can’t afford to see a doctor. Hundreds of thousands of Americans go bankrupt
every year because of medical bills. Neither
of these events occurs in any other developed country, most of which do not
have ‘socialized medicine’. Ibid, p. 2,3 (Some foreign health care systems
are more privatized than ours. P. 226) Many
developed countries, have quicker access to care and more choice than Americans
do. p. 227. All the other systems in the developed world, public and
private, are more frugal than ours.
America’s for-profit health insurance companies have the highest administrative
costs in the world, so the other systems are not bloated, wasteful
bureaucracies. p. 229. No other
wealthy country allows for-profit insurance. P. 235. Health insurance isn’t
cruel in other countries, even when for profit like America’s. p. 230. Those systems are not too foreign to work
in America. We do the same in America for veterans, active-duty military
personnel, the disabled and Native Americans. P. 231. All are required to
pay into the overall system. Every system finds ways to limit expenses
and all do, including the current American system. P. 238.

All the other developed countries have one system of
health care that applies to everybody p. 232.
No one is barred from seeking
other care. P. 235. The number one system is available from our choice of
the elements in the models provided by other countries, ibid, p. 223. We must end the fragmented structure of
overlapping and often conflicting payments systems for different subsets of the population. End the current
dependence on for-profit private insurers
(only). p. 225

[345] Section 3403 of the ACA)
should spare seniors high costs and discrimination in health care. By 2014, when everyone is required to be
health insured (sign up will be in October), a lower, 3.3% fee will
be required for private insurers to sell the new health care plan to be offered
by the federal government. States may charge, also,
but may choose to collect it from consumers, or employers.

[347] A
chance to argue to the American voter that ending charitable deductions only
hurts the rich and failing to do a carbon auction only hurts the environment so
poor people should support this DEMOCRATIC plan? Blue Dogs don’t do charitable
contributions Rs holding back on those budget changes and all others which
would support; Obama’s revenues in the budget which are necessary to supporting
the recovery.

[349] A fiscal study by the Lewin
Group found that single payer would cover all Minnesota residents and reduce
total health spending by $4.1 billion, or 8.8 percent, in 2014, and would save
$189.5 billion from 2014-2023 over what health care costs in Minnesota would be
under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The
plan would cover most medically necessary care with the exception of home care
(outside of what is now covered by Medicare) and nursing home care, and would
eliminate most cost-sharing, except for some small co-pays on specialty care
and medications (medications for chronic conditions would be excluded from
cost-sharing). Lewin estimated that
single payer would save employers currently offering coverage an average of
$1,214 per worker, and save an average of $1,362 for families. Employers not currently providing coverage
would pay an additional $1,963 per worker annually. Single payer could be financed with existing
sources of taxpayer funding for health care (including subsidies from the ACA)
combined with an average 7.2 percent effective payroll tax on employers, a 3
percent income tax on family adjusted gross income, and cigarette ($1.00/pack)
and alcohol taxes (5 cents per drink). The link to the Lewin study is at
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single-payer-system-cost – scroll down to Minnesota
2012. This could be extrapolated to the
entire country.

[355] And
cut the arcane restrictions which still forbid out of state doctors from
consulting with patients on the internet or by phone and the legal the legal
and insurance carriers which make it hard for employers to give employees a
financial incentive to choose medical tourism over local options---even though
insurers are allowed to offer such incentives to prompt patients to pick
cheaper doctors inside America (the Philippines allows nurses to work in the
private sector or abroad if they repay their student loans). The Economist,
August 16th to 22nd, 2008, p. 12;

[356] One
comedian says Chrysler runs a health care plan…with a sidelight in making cars.
Compared to other countries, our welfare state is small. Krugman, p. 252

[358] doctors
ought not to be paid to use tests not crucial to a patient’s health since they
increase overall health care spending, especially since no one checks and
authorizes using them. It’s better to pay doctors for choosing services, such
as researching different treatment options or offering advice to help patients
get better without treatment. Move toward paying doctors fixed salaries. NYT
July 29, 2007, Week in Review, p. 3

[359] Sen.
Maria Cantwell offers S 1256, the Home and community Balanced Incentives Act
and S. 1257, the Project 2020: Building on the Promise of Home and
Community-Based services Act, that would expand access to HCBS and encourage
other states to follow Washington State’s lead.

[377] An
alternate theory is of the Kuznets curve: as people enrich the upswinging curve
of carbon use flattens and turns down (highrises. Etc) so energy will not be an
ever increasing problem (and we should enrich the rest of the world) NYT
4/19/09 Science section, NYT, p. 4

[398] Scientific
American, January 2008, p. 64; In the world, Austria (1978) and Italy voted to
ban nuclear power, but the design and monitoring of many reactors has improved.
Sweden announced plans to start building plants again and they are contemplated
in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Belarus. The Economist,
March 21, 2009, p. 65

[400] It
would measure national carbon emissions and create a market to auction
emissions credits. The supply of credits would then be reduced each year to
meet predetermined carbon-reduction targets. As supply tightens, credit value
increases, providing rich monetary rewards for innovators, on sale of the
credits to others who have NOT reduced carbon. Van Jones, ibid, p. x. If a company plans to emit carbon dioxide, it
must buy one of these emissions credits. As an example, a consortium of 10
northeastern and mid-Atlantic states
sold 12.6m allowances (credits) of carbon dioxide, earning the state
governments a total of $40m. A national carbon auction could generate at least
$100b each year, according to climate experts and economists NRDC proposes
investing 60% of auction proceeds in the development of a dozen sectors of the
new green energy economy. Onearth Spring 2p009, p. 58

[401] Solutions,
Environmental Defense Sept 2006: 38 members of the Coalition, including
business and other consumers, point out that power are earnings returns far
beyond those of other industries with similar risks by letting now unregulated
generating plants to sell to the ir regulated utility arms. They sometimes
collect as much as $990 a megawatt hour for power that they had offered to sell
for $1 or even give away. They are making money hand over fist bv selling power
back to their regulated utility arms

[403]The ‘smart grid’ uses digital technology to collect,
communicate and react to data, making the system more efficient and reliable.
It fixes problems which cost $100b/year quickly. It could integrate electricity
from both predictable sources, such as coal, and fickle ones, such as the sun
and wind. Meters, to monitor both use and
prices, would give consumers more control over their electricity bill. Some
consumption would move to cheaper, off-peak hours, easing congestion and
reducing he need for new
infrastructure. Consumers would save money and emissions would fall, Installing
smart meters in 25% of American homes,
GE estimates, would be equivalent to removing 17m cars from the roads. Plug-in
hybrids, meanwhile, could charge at night, when demand is low, and even turn
power back to the grid while parked during the day. Local utility commissions
would have to change the pay rules for utilities so the reduced use of energy did
not reduce utilities’ profits. The Economist, 3/21/2009, p. 36

[404] Efficient
and open-transmission marketplace and a green-powerp-plant infrastructure would
require about a trillion dollars over the next fifteen years, about a third of
the projected Iraq war cost. Van Jones, ibid, p. xi

[405] It
uses digital technology to collect, communicate and react to data, making the
system more efficient and reliable. It fixes problems which cost $100b/year
quickly. It could integrate electricity from both predictable sources, such as
coal, and fickle ones, such as the sun and wind. Meters, to monitor both use
and prices, would give consumers more control over their electricity bill. Some
consumption would move to cheaper, off-peak hours, easing congestion and
reducing he need for new infrastructure. Consumers would save money and
emissions would fall, Installing smart meters in 25% of American homes, GE
estimates, would be equivalent to removing 17m cars from the roads. Plug-in
hybrids, meanwhile, could charge at night, when demand is low, and even turn
power back to the grid while parked during the day. Local utility commissions
would have to change the pay rules for utilities so the reduced use of energy
did not reduce utilities’ profits. The Economist, 3/21/2009, p. 36

[407] we
should create new jobs which protect the environment and create energy
independence. But the necessary number of new jobs have not been created and
the tax cut did not go to the people who need them; 66% in the red and blue
states agree we should “do whatever it takes to protect the environment.”; talk
about kids and voters are with you. “It takes a tough man or woman to make sure
our kids get clean air to breathe.”

[410] Sharply
increasing the use of renewable fuels could initially lead to higher prices at
the gas pump, much as the mandate to blend ethanol ito gasoline contributed to
higher prices in 2005.But, over time, they could reduce their production costs
and put downward pressure on oil prices. Republican proposals to expand supply
would take at least five years

[414] Reagan’s
administration stopped American oil savings begun in 1975 by President Ford
initiating CAFÉ standards by ending light vehicle efficiency which ended the
oil savings which were the nation’s biggest energy “source”,” now providing 2/5th
of U.S. energy services. This expense of automobiles could “undercut all of
today’s costly efforts by the U.S. to reform and stabilize the Middle East.”
American science and industry has innumerable listed ways to increase savings
simply and at low cost, also immensely benefiting our military. Lovins, p. 43
ff

“We are addicted to oil”. 97% of transportation fuel
currently comes from crude oil. It accounts for 25% of worldwide greenhouse gas
emissions. One million megawatts of “carbon-free” power is needed to make a
significant dent in projected carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. Otherwise, it
will get worse. So The U.S., China and India (none of which signed the Kyoto
Protocol) are scheduled to build about 850 carbon producing coal-fired plants.
By 2012 the emissions of those plants will overwhelm Kyoto reductions by a
factor of five. And the more difficult Kyoto requirement is to cut the rate of
carbon emissions in half by 2106.

104 The following trends will help reduce pollution: 1) as
the service sector grows larger than energy intensive production of steel, etc;
and 2) as we substitute cleverness for our notoriously inefficient energy
system.

Market forces alone are unlikely to curb our ever-growing
appetite for oil. Different states and countries will choose their method
depending on their institutional and economic capacities, natural resources
(wind in the Middle West, hydropower in the Northwest, solar and tide) and
political choices. We can succeed in holding carbon emissions to their current
rate without choking off economic growth.

We have asset of scientists; supporting science is
preferable to war for acquiring oil and

other natural resources we lack.

These changes are required by global warming, which, via
SUVs which Reagan put in America and autos with excessive fuel consumption and
local coal–fired utilities, have already caused regular increases in
temperature. Arctic shipping lanes replacing the Panama Canal, would be one of
the more benign effects. Floods, pestilence, hurricanes, droughts, major wild
fires in the West--even itchier cases of poison ivy would occur, not to mention
threats to coral and other marine organisms. (China blames global warming for
the typhoon coming into Shanghai in September, 2007.) Massive restructuring
would occur in the world’s energy economy. So, President Carter was right when
he called excess use of fuel the equivalent of war.

The projected cost
is $2 trillion capital investment over 20 years, and power plant costs
reduction, nuclear waste management and proliferation-resistant international
fuel cycle regimes must all occur. NRC regulations must be enforced more
diligently than previously. This requires long term investment of scientific,
economic and political resources to develop renewable sources that give little
or no carbon. Over the past 25 years
(Reagan through Bush) the public and private funding or research and
development in the energy sector has withered. Between 1980 and 2005 the
fraction of all U.S. R&D spending devoted to energy declined from 10 to 2%.
Annual public R&D funding for energy sank from $8 billion to $3 billion (in
2002 dollars); private R&D plummeted from $4 billion to $1 billion.
Republican presidents like oil

We have the important asset of scientists. We must invest
in research and development to cause stabilization of CO2 emission. It is
likely that no quick massive invention to capture carbon will come so all those
waiting are just stalling while oil and coal rake in more money than we need to
pay. We must, individually and business by business, reduce the carbon we make.

It’s true that we could try massive changes by scrubbing
CO2 directly from the air, carbon storage in minerals, nuclear fusion, nuclear
thermal hydrogen and artificial photosynthesis, but they will not have the
effect our individual and individual business efforts will have sooner.
Remaining fossil fuel systems must be equipped with modern controls and
advanced materials for cleaner air. Harvesting of renewable energy will have
brought about the revitalization of rural areas and the reclamation of degraded
land. Strong international enforcement mechanisms will control the spread of
nuclear technology from energy to weapons

The new, major, commitments to energy R&D would
require public funding of $15 billion to $30 billion a years---a five-fold to
10-fold increase over current levels.

De-carbonization does not conflict with the goal of eliminating the
world’s most extreme poverty because only a small reduction of emissions
reductions elsewhere will be required to offset the delivery of electricity and
modern cooking fuel to the earth’s poorest people. The best sources of
renewable energy, in order of decreasing carbon emissions, must be dramatically
increased.

Geo thermal: MIT
study suggests it has the potential to produce much of the nation’s electrical
power, cleanly and at a relatively low cost, but opposition to renewables by
the power companies starvation by delay, bureaucracy, throwing up logistic or
financial hurdles (such as charging new projects exorbitant ‘connection’ fees)
or simply apathy has slowed it all until Initiative 937 takes effect. Seattle
P-I, August 16, 2007, p. A6

In Europe Germany pays citizens four times more to produce
electricity than the price paid to a coal-fired power plant. Gainesville,
Florida has created a good effect on its economy by introducing higher payments
for solar power which is otherwise too expensive. The mayor of LA wants to
introduce higher payouts for solar power and California, Washington and Oregon
are considering strong policy as well.. Payment for 15-20 years periods are
considered.NYT, March 13, 2009, B1

Solar thermal (carbon free) currently provides only .15%
of the total generating capacity but it could potentially supply 5000 times as
much energy as the world currently consumes. An expansion of research efforts
would further enhance the performance of solar cells on the market.

California has joined Japan and Germany in leading a
global push for solar installations. Annual production of solar photo-voltaics
in the U.S. alone could grow to 10,000 MW in just 20 years if current trends
continue. Solar provides marginal energy
now, costing 5-13cents/kwh (will be 4-6cents/kwh, competitive with current coal
rates). But now they cost 20-25 cents/kwh compared to 4-6 cents/kwh for coal-fired
electricity, 5-7 cents/kwh for natural gas and 6-9 cents/kwh for biomass power
plants. It is being implemented now. In Kenya, their cost for solar power
provides for those with no access to electricity is ¼ the usual cost p. 86

Solar (CSP…concentrating solar power) generates
electricity by concentrating the sun’s rays, usually to boil water; still not
as cheap as coal or gas-fired plants, but if
fossil-fuel prices continue to increase and American power plants have
to start paying for their greenhouse-gas emissions, CSP might achieve “grid parity”
with the wholesale power price. Economist February 23, p. 84

Solar in the US remain prohibitively expensive (four times
the cost of coal)…only 1% of electricity generation…but utilities’ paying a
higher rate for renewable over a [period of years can offer those with solar
panels or wind turbines a steady return that help defray the initial ost of the
equipment. Solar advocates do not have the votes in Congress to adopt a
national feed in tariff system like the ones in Germany.NYT, 3/13/09, B1

Solar energy may now be stored using Fresnel lenses to
heat miles of black-painted pipe with molten salt solution inside. Ausra, of
Palo Alto, CA is making the components. The solar tower plant outside Seville,
Spain, can provide electricity for up to 6000 homes.NYT, 4/15/08 D3

Hydro (carbon free) provides 1/6th of world
power now

Wind (carbon free) now only produces 1% of the U.S.
electricity, but wind is closing in on the price of coal (The Economist,
6/21/08, p. 17) and the potential for expansion is enormous in the Middle West
and it could produce 20%. (NYT 2/23/08, p. A13). It now receives a 20% subsidy
(Atlantic, October 2008, p. 31). Delaware’s coastal winds produce a year-round
average output of 4 times the average electrical consumption of thee state, over
5,200 megawatts, near the east coast so as to reduce transmission lines (which
will cost between $3b and $6.4b, Atlantic, October 2008, p. 30), now running
under the sea. Intermittent nature will require emissions-spewing natural-gas
plants that can ramp up and down quickly). New Wind Power Politics, NYT,
September 24, 2008, p. 76. If the U.S. constructed enough wind farms, the
turbines could generate 11 trillion kwh, nearly three times the total amount
produced from all energy sources in the nation in 2005, and its’ the cheapest
form of new electricity at 4-7cents/kwh. How about a production tax credit?
Wind is still costlier than fossil fuel, and transport of the energy to the
populous areas will be expensive and controversial. Most of the TX energy produced
by FOREIGN countries’ businesses; but Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado and Oregon all
get 5-8% of their power from wind farms, per the American Wind Energy
Association. Note that marginal ranches and cotton farms are worth more with
wind turbines on them. Although it can take twenty years to pay back the
installation costs, net-metering can facilitate some current state laws
requiring utilities to buy excess power made by a residential turbine, and at
RETAIL rather than wholesale prices. Energy may be used from a home wind
turbine. and new technology makes it possible to feed excess developed
electricity back to the grid so the utility may be used only for backup power.
NYT 4/15/08, D3

And wind power, in Washington, makes poorer school
districts eligible to receive funding from DNR wind power farms, which produced
45% more in 2007 while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and demonstrating the
self-reliance needed to break our dependence on foreign sources of energy. ST,
520/08 p. B7

Nimby, but fossil fuel-burning power plants will have
a far more devastating environmental effect. 78, 106

Better placement of wind farms and individual turbines is
key to reducing bird fatalities. It is now standard practice to do bird studies
prior to construction. They are working to find
means to warm bats away from the spinning blades.

Nuclear (carbon free) provides 1/6th of world
power now; high capital and waste management costs, although, later could use
transuranics and eliminate wastes disposal problem).

Use open cycle first, later closed cycle because closed
cycle fuel more expensive, we have ample uranium without recycling plutonium
and the reprocessing and fuel-fabrication operations are highly dangerous.

Could be cheaper with mass production of modules, even
after giving up the economies of scale currently more expensive (6.7cents/kwh)
than coal (4.2cents/kwh)or gas powered
(5.8 cents/kwh) plants if
carbon emissions are PRICED (carbon tax) , nuclear distinctly favored
economically. Europe allows carbon to be traded on the open market.

Nuclear has made 12
applications to build new reactors, but the previous generation of reactors was
plagued by safety scares, design revisions and time-consuming regulatory
procedures, which resulted in ruinously protracted construction. Economist,
9/8/07, p. 71. Around the world, 31 reactors are under construction. They emit
almost none of the greenhouse gases, uranium is relatively abundant from
reassuringly stable places like Canada and Australia Economist, Nuclear Power,
p. 24

Proliferation problems (like Iran) may be handled by using
high start-up costs and large country economies of scale to discourage other
countries’ from the exploitable fuel enrichment and reprocessing plant
processes. 76, 104

*nimby, but Finland has build a permanent storage site
successfully

Efficiency We need dramatic improvements in the
performance and affordability of solar cells, wind turbines and
bio-fuels---ethanol and others derived from plants have paved the way for mass
commercialization. P. 84-90; efficient illumination, compressed-air systems,
new designs for heating and air conditioning, funneling heat losses from
compressors into heating buildings, and detailed energy measurement and
billing, roof overhangs, zero-net-energy prefabricated houses, solar-thermal
and photovoltaic collectors are opportunities, but no plan can suffice 85-90;
we need new attitudes and behaviors, not new light bulbs an reactors. The
average European uses 50% less energy than the average American. Using
switchgrass provides the most efficient energy production.

Co-generation China is currently using coal dust from
cement production to fuel the process James Fallows, The Atlantic, June 2008
p.36

Electric: The major challenge is coming up with a battery
that can store enough energy for a reasonable driving range at an acceptable
cost. Electricity production requires polluting carbon.94

Fuel cells: For energy companies to produce large amounts
of hydrogen at prices competitive with gasoline, building the infrastructure of
distribution will be costly. Hydrogen fuel-cell cars could become commercially
feasible if automakers succeed in developing safe, inexpensive, durable models
that can travel long distances before refueling. P. 94

Plug-in hybrids PHEVs (plug-in hybrids) could get the equivalent
of 80 to 160 mpg. The energy for cars would come from the electric grid, the
environmental impacts would be concentrated in a few thousand power plants
instead of in hundreds of millions of vehicles.

It will take technological breakthroughs and many decades
before hydrogen-based transportation would become a reality and have
wide-spread impact, but it still must prove itself sufficiently marketable. P.
91

Biofuels: ethanol,
now viewed almost universally as a disaster (Atlantic, October 2008, p. 30), is
expensive, it only lowers emissions 13% after you take into account the carbon
required for its creation; the economics of corn ethanol make no sense because
the U.S. puts a 54% tariff on cane ethanol from Brazil; it drives global grain
prices to the highest in a decade and corn prices are up 50%; takes more energy
to harvest the corn and refine the ethanol than the fuel can deliver to
combustion engines and its price is subject to the increasing cost of carbon
fuels; it takes a third of total cropland for cereals, oilseeds and sugar crops
to produce only 10% of America’s motor fuel;. This probably will not do much to
slow global worming unless the production of the bio-fuel becomes cleaner, but
the calculations change substantially when the ethanol is made from cellulosic
sources: woody plants such as switch-grass or poplar. Substituting cellulosic
ethanol for gasoline can slash greenhouse gas emissions by 90% or more. P. 90
NYT editorial 9/19/07

and greater production could greatly increase pressure on
water supplies for drinking, industry, hydropower, fish habitat and recreation
National Academy of Science Report of 10/10/07, NYT 10/1/07 p. A18

biodiesel can be made form rapeseed, sunflower, soybean
oils and waste animal fats); it is currently providing 40% of the fuel in
Brazil it is unlikely to dominate future fuel supply anytime soon and best
limited to cars and trucks until the price declines. Seattle P-I, August 16,
2007, p A6

Green diesel could be an economically competitive liquid
fuel for motor vehicles that would add virtually no greenhouse gases to the
atmosphere. P. 90

Hydrogen, greenhouse emissions but no marathon travel
possible and technological breakthroughs before hydrogen-based transportation
would become a reality and have wide-spread impact 97, 99; extracting hydrogen
from natural gas will only cut greenhouse gas emissions modestly compared to
gasoline hybrids p. 94, 96

Tide 20 years behind in development, but Nova Scotia,
China at Daishan, New York City’s East River, Portugal and Britain have
projects 112; ‘Puget Sound area leads the charge to tidal energy. Tacoma Power
the first to file with FERC, Snohomish County studying the science of it,
considering an ‘underwater wind farm’(turbines on the seabed), “the wave energy
available on the coast is greater than the power we now get from all hydropower
plants nationwide” but the federal government has frozen new permit
applications. Seattle P-I August 16, 2007, p. A6

Natural gas: not carbon free

Coal (with capture
and storage [CCS], which could, too expensively, capture from 85 to 95% of the
carbon in coal as CO2, with the rest released to the atmosphere) p. 68

liquified coal would be a mistake: technology to
convert well-established, but it
produces twice the greenhouse gases, creating a ton on carbon dioxide
for every barrel of liquid fuel, synfuel lost billions (‘snake oil of energy
alternatives’), would cost $70b to build enough plants to replace 10% of
American gasoline consumption NYT 5/29/07

Synfuels (emits same amount of CO2, and more carbon than
gas); U.S. lost billions on the 1980s
Synthetic Fuels Corporation NYT
5/29/07

Fusion reactors: development far in the future

Oil: not carbon free

Solutions:

1)follow
some states and Europe to put a price on carbon-whether in a tax on emissions
or in a cap-and-trade system (emission allowances like in the Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative, that are capped in aggregate at a certain level and
then traded in open markets)

2)increase
efficiency in electricity use by cutting buildings electricity use in half

3)coal
and natural gas plants must capture the CO2 and pump it into the ground

4)produce
renewable power from sunlight directly to energize photovoltaic cells or to
heat a fluid and drive a turbine

5)harnessing
hydro-power and wind power

6)using
geothermal energy by mining the earth’s interior

7)develop
the political solutions to waste disposal and avoidance of accidents

8)decarbonizing
transportation

9)eliminating
deforestation

10)curtailing
emissions of methane

11)stimulate
the commercialization of low-carbon technologies (wind, photovoltaic power and
hybrid cars)

12)encourage
utilities to invest in CO2 capture and storage

13)obtain
installation and maintenance of efficient appliances by power utilities

14)motivate
natural gas companies to care about the buildings where their gas is burned

15)motivate
oil companies to care about the engines that run on their fuel.

16)Decrease
weight, improve tires and reduce drag of vehicles

17)Develop
the alternate distribution system for the fuel alternatives

18)Create
a “feebate” scheme, in which customers pay an extra fee to buy big
fuel-consumers but get a rebate if they buy small, fuel-efficient models,
increase CAFÉ standards, add higher fuel taxes and give tax incentives to spur
more rapid changes in the production facilities for new technologies. The
energy companies would then have an enormous financial incentive to advance the
development and commercialization of renewable energy sources, creating
thousands of jobs and alleviating our international trade deficits.

19)The
most important step toward creating a sustainable energy economy is to
institute market-based schemes to make the prices of carbon fuels reflect their
social costs.

Policy changes like energy taxes, financial
incentives, professional training, labeling, environmental legislation,
greenhouse gas emissions trading and international coordination of regulations
for traded products and giving people the energy services they need without
having to build as many power plants, refineries or gas pipelines. But all OECD
countries except Japan have so far failed to update appliance standards
(footnotes: i. President Carter was right (moral equivalent of war [which is
occurring now]. President Reagan was wrong, his agencies allowing SUVs.

The newest capacity is mostly in the Far East

there is an opinion by Julia Olmstead that focus on
JUST biofuels is foolish: because we would need to nearly double the land used
for harvested crops, plant all of it in corn, since the switchgrass Bush
mentioned would provide only a small fraction of the energy we demand, the
creation process requires oil, corn and soybean production is economically
unsustainable (erosion, pollution with pesticides, fertilizer runoff); but
improvement of fuel efficiency in cars by just 1 mile per gallon---possible with
proper tire inflation---would cut fuel consumption equal to the total among of
ethanol federally mandated for production in 2012; so, she says, raise the tax
on gasoline, raise energy-efficiency standards for all vehicles, appliances,
industries and new buildings, use land use rules and tax incentives to
discourage suburban sprawl and encourage dense mixed-use development, better
fund mass transit, develop other, truly sustainable energy technologies, and
make hybrid cars more affordable Seattle P-I, Wednesday, July 12, 2005,

[419] Washington
State ranks only behind Texas for a creating new wind power. National Academy
of Sciences concluded that pesticides and collisions with cars and buildings
killed more birds and bats than turbines. Seattle P-I, August 16, 2007;

[421] The
King County sewage treatment plant in Renton is trapping methane from sewage to
power fuel cells (first of its kind), Klickitat County rotting trash is made
into gas power, scraps from lumber and pulp-and-paper plants fuel the state’s
largest biomass facilities, burning bark, sawdust and scrap wood for energy;
these efforts ‘don’t amount to a hill of beans’, but could be expanded Seattle
P-I, August16, 2007, p. A-6

[425] Britain’s
Carbon Trust finds aluminum, cement and some steel production are the most
vulnerable. Best of all, set a carbon tax, which is less susceptible to capture
by business lobbies than is a cap-and-trade system. If we must adopt a
cap-and-trade, auction the permits, otherwise emissions will continue to rise
and polluters will profit instead of paying. The Economist, January 9-25th,
2008, p. 14 (most dirty coal-fired plants are in the South and D.C.)

[427] 75% of new cars sold in Brazil are so-called flex cars
that can run on alcohol or gasohol, a mixture of ethanol and gasoline. Both
fuels are readily available at 29,000 service stations across the country. It
may be produced from sugar cane. Ethanol is exported all over the world, is
non-toxic and bio-degradable and is cheaper than gas. “Ethanol to
oil-dependency rescue”, Maria Elena Salinas, Noticiero Univision, 2006,
(Seattle P-I, 7/06)

[429] through
a tax on carbon emissions or a pollution-trading system. A $100-a-ton tax on
carbon dioxide would increase the costs of coal-fired electricity by 400% and
natural-gas-generated power by 100% while hydropower costs would not increase
at all. NYT 5/17/07

[430] energy
saving opportunities in American homes are immense with current technology but
new product standard mandates will be needed, according to a study by the
McKinsey Global Institute. There should be more stringent product standards so
that all new appliances are energy-efficient models (that will require
landlords to include the most efficient equipment even though tenants are the
ones who pay the utilities). Could save 110 new coal-fired 600-megawatt power
plants. For our own prices and lives, we should subsidize energy efficiency for
the less affluent. And we should suggest the same to China, India. NYT 5/17/07

American Electric Power, a coal-burning utility
company, plans to install huge banks of high-technology batteries. The
investment would position the company well if any of the 11 states in its
service territory establish a minimum quota for renewable energy, or if
Congress sets a national standard; it would also help if carbon control were
instituted and wind power were to gain a financial advantage over coal NYT,
9/11/07 at C2

Unregulated electricity costs more. Slince 1999
prices for industrial customers in deregulated states have risen from 18% above
the national average to 37% above. Power in the Public Interest (Marilyn
Showalter) NYT 11/06/07 p. Business

[431] Marilyn
Showalter, advocate of publicly owned power systems shows: The cost of power in
market states has risen faster than is states that had retained traditional
rate regulation. Of the 25 states, and the District of Columbia, that had
adopted competition, only one, California, is even talking about expanding
market pricing. Illinois ratepayers got a $1b rebate. Ohio negotiating hw to
end competitive electricity pricing. Virginia has repealed its law. NYT,
Business, 09/4/07, p. C1

[433] This
decrease in neighborhood size should be aided since our aging population is
downsizing and younger adults don’t need a yard and flower beds.

[434] Kyoto
would have injured the business sector of the economy. We’re getting better,
but the U.S. air pollution still kills 135,000 Americans, and 2.8 million
people from other countries, each year, just less than HIV/AIDS; if we
developed village-level power technologies using fuel cells, solar power, and
agricultural wastes we would do better than by massive investments in copper
wires and coal turbines in India.

Human
activity has doubled he risk of heat waves like the one in 2003 that killed
tens of thousands in Europe.

60% of
trees, plants…have been destroyed and the damage is substantial and
irreversible.

That Kyoto
does not kill the economy is demonstrated numerous places in our country

In
Portland, America’s environmental laboratory, they have achieved significant
per person reductions in carbon below the Kyoto required levels of 1999.
Portland officials insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has
entailed no significant economic price and on the contrary has brought the city
huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy by government, more convenient
transportation, a greener city and expertise in energy deficiency that is
helping local businesses win contracts worldwide. (A Livable Shade of Green by
Nicholas D. Kristof (Op Ed, NYT, 7/05)

[436] Zarb,
NYT 5/23/07: four facts 1) US very
vulnerable to interruption of its imported oil supply;

2) this dependence has a huge effect on our foreign, military and
economic policies;

3)
America could have reduced sits vulnerability if it had taken decisive action
after the 1973 Arab oil embargo (in 1973 we imported 35%, now 60%);

4) we have never adopted a credible plan to reduce our dependency
principally because of a lack of political will.

Ford failed
suggesting 200 nuclear, 20 synthetic plants, but with important environmental
and cost problems; Carter’s synthetic fuels failed; any credible policy
requires permanent 50 cent increase in gas prices with 50 cents more each year
for 3 years, so alternative must be sought, with 4% increase in CAFE standards,
resume nuclear construction since current nuclear has outstanding record of
safety and security and new designs will only raise performance (speed federal
licensing)

[443] biggest
cities, five banks, the William J. Clinton Foundation and companies and groups
that modernize aging buildings pledged investments of billions of dollars to
cut urban energy use and releases of heat-trapping gases linked to global
warming. They would upgrade energy-hungry heating, cooling and lighting systems
in older buildings. The loans and interest would be paid back with the savings.
NYT 5/17/07

[446] carbon
sequestration technology doesn’t really exist yet and will always be incredibly
complicated and expensive. Norway and Sweden instituted carbon taxes in 1991
and the EU is debating its own. Amory Lovins has worked with firms such as IBM,
British Telecom, Alcan, Norske-Canada, and Bayer, which collectively cut their
carbon emissions 60% in the past decade, saving $2 billion in the process.
Sierra, Bill McKibben, January/February 2007

[451] 38
members of the Coalition, including business and other consumers, point out
that power are earnings returns far beyond those of other industries with
similar risks by letting now unregulated generating plants to sell to the ir
regulated utility arms. They sometimes collect as much as $990 a megawatt hour
for power that they had offered to sell for $1 or even give away. They are
making money hand over fist b selling power back to their regulated utility
arms NYT, 12/17/07 p. 1

[454] Ravitch,
Diane, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Basic Books,
2010:

The schools will surely be failures if students
graduate knowing how to choose the right option from four bubbles on a
multiple-choice test, but unprepared to lead fulfilling lives, to be
responsible citizens, and to make good choices for themselves, their families,
and our society. This constant reform churn is NOT the approach typically found
in countries with successful schools. Instead the experts stated the essential
ingredients of a successful education system: “a strong curriculum’;
experienced teachers; effective instruction; willing students; adequate
resources; and a community that values education” p. 224 The most durable way
is to improve curriculum and instruction and to improve the conditions in which
teachers work and children learn, not organization, management and control.

[458] Our
schools will not improve if we continue to focus only on reading and
mathematics, rely exclusively on tests, close neighborhood schools in the name
of reform, if we value only what tests measure, or rely on them as the only
means of deciding the fate of students, teachers, principals and schools, if we
try to entrust them to ‘the magical powers of the market’, if charter schools
siphon away the most motivated students and their families in the poorest communities
from the regular public schools, if we continue to drive away experienced
principals, if we ignore the disadvantages associated with poverty that affect
children’s ability to learn, if we use them as society’s all-purpose punching
bag. P. 228 Testing alone remove the love of learning, may leave children
ignorant of current events, the structure of government, the principles of
economics, the fundamentals of science the key works of literature of our
culture and others, the practice and appreciation of the arts or the major
events and ideas that have influenced our nation and the world. Even as their
scores go up they may be devoid of any desire to deepen their understanding and
knowledge and may have no interest in reading anything for their own enlightenment
and pleasure. And so we may find that we have obtained a paradoxical and
terrible outcome: higher test scores and worse education.

It is unlikely that the U.S. would have emerged as a
word leader had it left the development of education to the whim and will of
the free market.

The curriculum is the starting point for other
reforms. Nations such as Japan and Finland have developed excellent curricula
that spell out what students are supposed to learn in a wide variety of
subjects. P. 230 Teachers should make sure that all children have a steady diet
of good…no excellent…literature in their classrooms (Lincoln, King Jr.,
Thoreau, Cady Stanton, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Milton,
Locke, Mill, Lewis Carroll).

It is possible to develop a history curriculum that
is challenging and lively. Sanitizing of books can turn school into “the Empire
of Boredom.”

Even if a national curriculum might be captured by “the wrong people” we must
change from what now exists.

The goal of evaluation should not be to identify
schools that must be closed, but to identify schools that need help.

Families must do their part to get children ready for
school. Families implant basic attitudes and values about learning, as well as
the self-discipline and good manners necessary for learning in a group.
Families must remain involved with their children, encourage them, monitor
their schoolwork, limit the time they spend with electronic devices, meet with
their teachers, and see that they have a regular place to study.

Atlantic, Scenes From The Class Struggle, by Joel
Klein, June 2001, p. 66

[461] Since
the 1970s the U.S. has fallen behind other countries in quality of education,
completion of high school and college and technical competence. State funding

[462] The
Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz,
p.268; Our students lack college readiness by dropping out or low quality
education. They also lack the financial access to higher education for those
who are college ready. P. 347. The minority and low-income children left behind
may be assisted by Head Start, Job
Corps, investment in high quality early childhood education, financial aid.
Analytical education in finance, nanotechnology, cellular biology, nurses and
medical technology are required as well as skills for which there is no
substitute are most important to progress and security. p. 346 ff.

[465] the
administration gave clear dominance to the banks over Sallie Mae on student
loans (3 m) when those private sources cost the government much more due to
subsidies and guarantees against default for those private companies. NYT 4/15/07

the
achievement gap is a national disgrace and equal opportunity is a national
command. We must make a commitment much stronger than the NCLB; and we should
target job training to the skills needed to better paying jobs.

[466] We
must correct this situation: about a quarter of information technology firms in
Silicon Valley (which accounted for more
than half of America’s overall productivity growth since 1995 The Economist,
4/12-18, p. 38) were founded by Chinese and Indians. Some 40% of American PhDs
in science and engineering go to immigrants. A similar proportion of the
patents filed in America are filed by foreigners.

[467] Congress
should raise the limit on government guaranteed loans, take Sallie Mae back
from private: it originated 25% of the student loans last year; gov’t makes
lenders nearly whole, even if the student defaults, and the companies are
guaranteed by law a decent rate of return…the lender takes no risk; in 2006 the
company made over $1b; never ending tuition raises are in the future; the entire
educational-lending racket is putting thousands of debt onto a class of
Americans who will probably have to
struggle to pay it back Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School; Clinton made
DIRECT loans, not through the industry; Bush’s Lord (accumulated $235m plus
future $135m payoff) took it out of the government, built controversial ties to
the university loan aid officials, helped push back the DIRECT loan business,
which many people believe offers taxpayers a much better deal; NYT 4/21/07 B8

[469] As
of 3/7/2010, Rs increased deficit over Clinton plan which would have eliminated
the deficit by 2011. NYT 3/7/2010 p. 12 re recent changes; doesn't annihilate
the poor and gut Social Security and the middle class while passing even more
of the benefits of our society up to a few at the top.

ALTERNATIVE DEFICIT REDUCTION: 1) Restore pre-Reagan
top tax rates. We didn't have massive deficits until we reduced the top tax
rates; 2) Income is income. No more reduced capital gains tax rate. The
incentive to invest should be to make a bunch of money from a good investment.
The reason there is a low capital gains tax rate is that the wealthy get most
of their income from capital gains. And the reason they get most of their
income from capital gains is there is a low capital gains rate. The resulting
income shifting schemes are a drag on the rest of us. (Also applies to
dividends.); 3) Income is income. Inheritance income should be taxed as income,
except there should be a "democracy cap" on how much someone can
inherit. We decided not to have an aristocracy when we founded this country so
we shouldn't have one; 4) Businesses should be taxed or not taxed, but not
taxed AND not taxed. They shouldn't be able to use "double Irish" or
"Dutch sandwich" or operate out of PO boxes in Bermuda or the Cayman
Islands. (Bonus, this also helps reduce incentives to send our jobs and
factories out of the country.); 5) If you don't pay your taxes We, the People
won't pay to provide you with services. We can start by not allowing you to
have a driveway that connects to public streets, or water/sewer hookups or
mail. Also we won't enforce any contracts for you, including the one that says
you "own" your house(s). And no government-developed Internet for you6)
Speaking of sea-lane protection, why do we have a military budget comparable to
when we faced nuclear annihilation by the Soviet empire? Bases in Germany and
Japan? And why can I go to this website, pick a DC-area zip code, say 22314,
and learn that "Dollar Amount of Defense Contracts Awarded to Contractors
in this Zip Code from 2000 to 2009: $7,086,397,848." Seriously, scroll
down the page and look at some of the contracts and amounts awarded. I suspect
there's some serious deficit reduction to be found in the military budget. A
comprehensive and very public audit of where all that money has been going
since, say, 1981 might take a chunk out of the debt problem all by itself; 7) I
could start listing all the corporate subsidies, tax breaks, monopoly grants,
schemes, contracts, etc. that we pay for, but I think you get the idea. How
about calling bribery by its name: bribery, and doing something about it? 8) To
the extent that implementing this plan does not clear up the deficit and start
paying off the debt, how about a yearly national property tax on all individual
holdings above, say, $5 million, with the tax rate progressively increasing as
total wealth increases, and keep doing this each year until the debt is paid
off. Perhaps start at 1% on $5 million, 2.5% at $10 million, 5% at $50 million,
etc. (Hedge fund managers and investment bankers start at 50% and go up, just
for the heck of it. We can call this the "get the money from where the
money went tax.")

So there is MY deficit-reduction plan. Or, instead,
we could do what the "serious people" deficit-reduction plans do: cut
services for We, the People, cut Social Security, cut health care, cut
education, cut infrastructure, cut the things that make life better for people,
and give all the money to a few at the top. Take your pick.

[486] Mother
Jones (July-August, 2005) SF, CA but remember that, in the long run, reducing
the deficit reduces demand and the contracting effect could aid China and
Europe by a coordinated rise in China’s currency and pro-growth economic reform
in Europe.

[487] In
Grover Norquist’s words, to make the federal government so small you could
drown it in a bathtub.

The cause
of the Iraqi invasion was their possession of the world’s largest untapped oil
fields and its potential for fueling America and vast profits to industry. NYT,
Bob Herbert, July 1, 2008, p. A23

[498] Jefferson
first suggested that we not have a standing army and wrote a series of letters
in 1787, as the Constitution was being debated, urging James Madison to write
it into the Constitution. The idea was for every able-bodied (man) in the nation to be member of local
militia, under local control, with a gun in his house, If the nation was in
vaded, word would come down to the local level and every (man) in the country
would be the army.

Pentagon thinking now is that we can walk and chew
gum at the same time: quadrennial review looking at the last, Bush, quadrennial
which kept war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending
American territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing
terrorists and adversaries form obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear
weapons …a broad range of missions, we could move them to other parts of
government.

Beware the allegation that Democrats favor gun
control. Use Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer’s line that ‘gun control’ in
Montana means ‘hit what you aim at’. They’ll use 38 states are considering
gun-related bills, but point out that they focus not on ownership rights,
homeowners nor parents but on convicted criminals, the mentally ill and on
improving methods to trace guns used in crimes; Governor Schwarzenegger of CA ,
R, has supported several bills that focus on guns used in crimes but not bills
that would cut ownership rights NYT, 4/15/08 p.1

[499] This
policy change would gain western states, hunters, fisherman (and votes in the
South although the South will nevertheless be lost anyway). Bush is already
losing the west due to anti-environmental policies [e.g. Montana election,
anger at oil drilling in Colorado]. No “anti-gun” legislation would make any
difference anyway due to the 215 million guns already in circulation, and the
black market that would develop immediately. Gun limitations will be a failure
if it leaves individual Americans naked against risk. Atlantic, p 33, March 2005

40% of Americans own guns so show respect and
understanding for them Carville, Begala, p. 49-51 (father bought guns for his
sons [which are under lock and key]. Democrats should support the rights of
hunters and the Bill of Rights (2nd Amendment, too)

Pentagon thinking can we walk and chew gum at the same
time: quadrennial review looking at the last, Bush, quadrennial which kept
war-fighting, including defeating violent extremists, defending American
territory, helping countries at strategic crossroads and preventing terrorists
and adversaries form obtaining biological, chemical or nuclear weapons …a broad
range of missions, or could move them to other parts of government.

[500] Stevens, John Paul, Six
Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, 2014, p. 132

[502] We
pay $52,000 per year to imprison non-violent offenders for: 1) importing
lobster tails in plastic bags rather than cardboard boxes; 2) ‘three strikes’
perpetual imprisonment for non-violent criminals; 3) violations of immigration
laws, environmental standards and arcane business rules; 4) the same crime
described different ways. Other countries use non-custodial sentences where
they do community work (not sending criminals to ‘college for criminals’ where
they learn to be more effective criminals)(Netherlands), where they could be
regulated rather than expensively imprisoned. We use mandatory minimum
sentences when the size of the penalty, we know statistically, or the
possibility of getting caught, NEVER ENTER THE MIND OF THE PROSPECTIVE
CRIMINAL. Not letting them vote is merely pointlessly vindictive, doesn’t teach
anything and infringes on democracy. The Dutch prison system has been falling
for some years and it has closed eight prisons (p. 29)The Economist, 7/24/10, p
13, 26

[504] Kerlikowske
at head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, would end the ‘war’ on
drugs and place more emphasis on treatment and prevention. Norm Stamper, active
with the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, would help. Legalization would
save $7.7b in law-enforcement costs and generate more than $65b in revenue if
taxed like cigarettes and alcohol.ST 6/16/09, p. 1

[517] One study, by Shawn Brimley
and Paul Scharre, declares that we must start FRESH: have three overarching
missions:

1) defend the homeland: Defense Command would
guard American airspace and manage domestic disaster response (through building
the forces to execute the goal [drawing personnel from the entire military
based on experience and ability, developing the achievement capabilities…more
robotics systems, protection of existing special operations and cyberspace
capabilities, reduction of short-range aircraft and tanks])

3) maintain a stabilizing presence abroad
Presence Command would be responsible for day-to-day American military presence
in global hot spots and for enabling allies and partners, requiring
understanding of regtions and cultures

Eliminate current Regional Commands, and
bureaucracy, to raise diplomacy (under the State Department) subordinating the
military.

Allow the hiring, for their choice of
term, of midcareer professionals who have skills in key areas like
cybersecurity and economic development, eliminating the “all volunteer force”)
to liberate innovation and speed response time.

The Joint Chiefs would be only the
chairman and the heads of th three new commands, reducing general, flag and
civilian executives proportionately.

[535] 7 absurd ways the military
wastes taxpayer dollars; This article originally appeared on AlterNet.

The
David Petraeus scandal has shined a light on the luxurious, subsidized
lifestyle of the U.S. military’s top generals. But so far, what the media has
uncovered only scratches the surface of the abuses. Here are eight absurd ways
the military wastes our money–and none of them have anything to do with
national defense.

1.A whole battalion of generals? The titles “general” or “admiral” sound
like they belong to pretty exclusive posts, fit only for the best of the best.
This flashy title makes it pretty easy to say, “so what if a few of our
military geniuses get the royal treatment–particularly if they are the sole
commanders of the most powerful military in human history.” The reality,
however, is that there nearly 1,000 generals and admirals in the U.S. armed
forces, and each has an entourage that would make a Hollywood star
jealous.According to 2010 Pentagon reports, there are 963 generals and admirals
in the U.S. armed forces. This number has ballooned by about 100 officers since
9/11 when fighting terror–and polishing the boots of senior military personnel
–became Washington’s number-one priority. (In roughly that same time frame,
starting in 1998, the Pentagon’s budget also ballooned by more than 50
percent.); Jack Jacobs, a retired U.S. army colonel and now a military analyst
for MSNBC, says the military needs only a third of that number. Many of these
generals are “spending time writing plans and defending plans with Congress,
and trying to get the money,” he explained. In other words, a large number of
these generals are essentially lobbyists for the Pentagon, but they still
receive large personal staffs and private jet rides for official paper-pushing
military matters; Dina Rasor, founder of Project on Government Oversight, a
watchdog group, explains that this “brass creep” is “fueled by the desire to
increase bureaucratic clout or prestige of a particular service, function or
region, rather than reflecting the scope and duties of the job itself;” It’s
sort of like how Starbucks titles each of its baristas a “partner” but
continues to pay them just over minimum wage (and a caramel macchiato per
shift); As Rasor writes, “the three- and four-star ranks have increased twice
as fast as one- and two-star general and flag officers, three times as fast as
the increase in all officers and almost ten times as fast as the increase in
enlisted personnel. If you imagine it visually, the shape of U.S. military
personnel has shifted from looking like a pyramid to beginning to look more
like a skyscraper;” But the skyscraper model doesn’t mean that the armed forces
are democratizing. In fact, just the opposite; they’re gaming the system to
allow more and more officers to deploy the full power of the U.S. military to
aid their personal lives–whether their actual work justifies it or not; 2. The
generals’ flotillas. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates appointed Arnold
Punaro, a retired major general in the Marines, to head an independent review
of the Pentagon’s budget. Here’s the caution he came up with: “We don’t want
the Department of Defense to become a benefits agency that occasionally kills a
terrorist; ” So, just how good are these benefits? For the top brass, not bad
at all. According to a Washington Post investigation, each top commander has
his own C-40 jet, complete with beds on board. Many have chefs who deserve
their own four-star restaurants. The generals’ personal staff include drivers,
security guards, secretaries, and people to shine their shoes and iron their
uniforms. When traveling, they can be accompanied by police motorcades that
stretch for blocks. When entertaining, string quartets are available at a snap
of the fingers; A New York Times analysis showed that simply the staff provided
to top generals and admirals can top $1 million–per general. That’s not even
including their own salaries–which are relatively modest due to congressional
legislation–and the free housing, which has been described as “palatial.” On
Capitol Hill, these cadres of assistants are called the generals’ “flotillas; ”
In Petraeus’ case, he didn’t want to give up the perks of being a four-star
general in the Army, even after he left the armed forces to be director of the
CIA. He apparently trained his assistants to pass him water bottles at timed
intervals on his now-infamous 6-minute mile runs. He also liked “fresh, sliced
pineapple” before going to bed; 3. Scandals. Despite the seemingly limitless
perks of being a general, there is a limit to the military’s (taxpayer-funded)
generosity. That’s led some senior officers to engage in a little creative
accounting. This summer the (formerly) four-star general William “Kip” Ward was
caught using military money to pay for a Bermuda vacation and using military
cars and drivers to take his wife on shopping and spa excursions. He traveled
with up to 13 staff members, even on non-work trips, billing the State
Department for their hotel and travel costs, as well as his family’s stays at
luxury hotels; In November, in the midst of the Petraeus scandal, Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta demoted Ward to a three-star lieutenant general and
ordered him to pay back $82,000 of the taxpayers’ misused money. The debt
shouldn’t be hard to repay; Ward will receive an annual retirement salary of
$208,802; Panetta may have been tough–sort of–on now three-star general Ward,
but he’s displayed a complete refusal to reevaluate the bloated ranks of the
military generals. Unlike his predecessor, Robert Gates, who has come out
publicly against the increasing number of top-ranking officers and tried to
reduce their ranks, Panetta has so far refused to review their numbers and has yet
to fire a single general or admiral for misconduct. He did, however, order an
“ethics training” after the Petraeus scandal; 4. Warped sense of reality. After
the Petraeus scandal, the million-dollar question was: Did the general who
essentially built the world’s most invasive surveillance apparatus really think
he could get away with carrying on a secret affair without anyone knowing?
Former Secretary of State Gates has floated at least one theory at a press
conference in Chicago: “There is something about a sense of entitlement and
having great power that skews people’s judgement;”A handful of retired
diplomats and service members have come out in support of Gates’ thesis. Robert
J. Callahan, a retired diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua,
wrote an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune explaining how the generals’ perks allow
them to exist on a plain removed from ordinary people: “Those with a star are
military nobility, no doubt, and those with four are royalty. Flying in
luxurious private jets, surrounded by a phalanx of fawning aides who do
everything from preparing their meals to pressing their uniform trousers, they
are among America’s most pampered professionals. Their orders are executed
without challenge, their word is fiat. They live in a reality different from
the rest of us;” Frank Wuco, a retired U.S. Naval intelligence chief, agrees;
“With the senior guys and the flag officers, this is like the new royalty,” he
said on his weekly radio show. “We treat them like kings and princes. These general
officers in the military, at a certain point, become untouchable… In many
cases, they get their own airplanes, their own helicopters. When they walk into
a room, everybody comes to attention. In the case of some of them, people are
very afraid to speak up or to disagree. Being separated from real life all the
time in that way probably leaves them vulnerable (to lapses in moral
judgement);” Sounds like a phenomenon that’s happening with another pampered
sector of society (hint: Wall Street). Given the epic 2008 financial collapse,
do we really want to set our security forces on a similar path of power,
deception and deep, crisis-creating delusion? 5. Military golf. Of course,
generals and admirals aren’t the only ones who get to enjoy some of perks of being
in the U.S. armed forces. Although lower ranking service members don’t get
private jets and personal chefs, U.S. taxpayers still spend billions of dollars
a year to pay for luxuries that are out of reach for the ordinary American.The
Pentagon, for example, runs a staggering 234 golf courses around the world, at
a cost that is undisclosed.According to one retired Lieutenant Colonel in the
Air Force, who also just happens to be the senior writer at Travel Golf, the
very best military golf course in the U.S. is the Air Force Academy’s
Eisenhower Blue Course in Colorado Springs, CO.; He writes, “This stunning
7,000-plus yard layout shares the same foothills terrain as does the legendary
Broadmoor, just 20 minutes to the south in Colorado Springs. Ponderosa pines,
pinon and juniper line the fairways with rolling mounds, ponds and almost tame
deer and wild turkey.” (The Department of Defense did come under fire a number
of decades ago when it was discovered that the toilet seats at this course cost
$400 a pop.); And the number of golf courses is often undercounted, with
controversial courses in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Mosul, Iraq, often left off
the lists, which makes assessing the total costs difficult; Yet some courses
rack up staggering expenses as they become far more than mere stretches of
grass; According to journalist Nick Turse, “The U.S. Army paid $71,614 [in
2004] to the Arizona Golf Resort — located in sunny Riyadh, Saudi Arabia… The
resort actually boasts an entire entertainment complex, complete with a
water-slide-enhanced megapool, gym, bowling alley, horse stables, roller hockey
rink, arcade, amphitheater, restaurant, and even a cappuccino bar — not to
mention the golf course and a driving range; ”DoD’s Sungnam golf course in the
Republic of Korea, meanwhile, is reportedly valued at $26 million; For
non-golfers, the military also maintains a ski lodge and resort in the Bavarian
Alps, which opened in 2004 and cost $80 million; 6. “The Army goes rolling
along!” Vacation resorts aren’t the only explicitly non-defense-related
expenditures of the Department of Defense. According to a Washington Post
investigation, the DoD also spends $500 million annually on marching bands; The
Navy, the Army, the Air Force and the Marine Corps all maintain their own military
bands, which also produce their own magazines and CDs; The bands are [pun
intended] “an instrument of military PR,” according to Al McCree, a retired Air
Force service member who owns Altissimo Recordings, a Nashville record label
featuring music of the service bands; The CDs are–by law–distributed for free,
but that doesn’t mean the private sector can’t profit off these marching bands.
According to the Washington Post article, “The service CDs have also created a
private, profitable industry made up of companies that obtain the band
recordings under the Freedom of Information Act. They then re-press and package
them for public sale;” As if subsidizing the industry of multibillion-dollar
arms dealers weren’t enough, the record industry is apparently also leeching
off the taxpayer-funded military spending; 7. The Pentagon-to-Lockheed
pipeline. While the exorbitant costs of private planes and hundreds of golf
courses may seem bad enough, the most costly problem with the
entitlement-culture of the military happens after generals retire. Since
they’re so used to the luxurious lifestyle, the vast majority of
pension-reaping high-ranking officers head into the private defense industry;
According to William Hartung, a defense analyst at the Center for International
Policy in Washington DC, about 70 percent of recently retired three- and
four-star generals went straight to work for industry giants like Lockheed
Martin; “If you don’t go into industry at this point you are the exception,”
Hartung said; This type of government-to-industry pipeline, which he said was
comparable to the odious Wall Street-to-Washington revolving door, drives up
the prices of weapons and prevents effective oversight of weapon manufacturing
companies–all of which ends up costing taxpayers more and more each year; “I
think the overspending on the generals and all their perks is bad enough, but
the revolving door and the ability of these people to cut industry a break in
exchange for high salaries costs more in the long run,” said Hartung. “This can
affect the price of weapons and the whole structure of how we oversee
companies. It’s harder to calculate, but certainly in the billions, compared to
millions spent on staff per general;”

[536] 337
The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous,
and Less Free, by Preble, Christopher, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University :Press,
2009

[543] Ghost
Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the
Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Steve Coll, Penguin Books, p. 474.

[544]Don’t
Al Qaeda in Af-Pak and pirates in Somalia show that ‘terrorism’ will, despite
HUGE taxpayer spending, always be uncontrolled, even by the largest army,
largest navy in the world? And
how do missiles affect terrorists? How does our Air Force affect terrorists?
THEN WHY PAYFOR THEM?

[557] Cut the Military Budget, The Nation,
March 2, 2009, p. 6ff. Cut the Missile Defense System. Slow the development of
future combat systems. Alan Greenspan says military spending was not good for
the economy and, to the extent that it is reduced, the economy would benefit.

[573] consider
recycling all U.S. nuclear weapons, after telling other countries we will ask
them to do the same, then recycle all that nuclear to energy alternative
nuclear, going immediately to individual effort, wind, solar, re-newables for
all energy after the initial burst of nuclear from dispensing with weapons…JOIN
US TO SAVE THE WORLD; New Zealand, Ireland, Austria, Norway, the Netherlands
and Switzerland are leading the way y refusing to accept excepting India from the ban on nuclear
weapons and fuel.NYT editorial, August 31, 2008

Republicans are surrendering their advantage on national security poll,
4/8/05, but we must praise troops (considered like family by Americans) in
Vietnam, too, as well as Iraq, unless we want further to risk many peoples’
feelings that Democrats had been rooting against America. They resented that.
Not true, as implied by the Rs, because 90% of veterans reported a friendly
homecoming. Harris poll.

[576] Since
the oil countries could deny us essential fuel; use renewable energy, not oil;
don’t make enemies of oil countries; see American Theocracy, The Peril and
Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st
Century, Phillips, Kevin , p. 1-98

[578]Polls show that, even with the war going well, a
majority of Americans favor withdrawal no matter what happened during the
‘surge’ and call the war a mistake, NYT January 6, 2008, Frank Rich, Opinion,
p. 13

[585] Tsarist
Russia (7000 victims) and Europe in the 1800s, the assassination of Franz Josef
that start World War I, Kennedy’s ‘missile gap’, the IRA in Ireland, the
Basques in Spain, the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the Chechens in
Russia. We’ve always created the ‘enemy of the year’ to scare us into foreign policy
changes(Libya, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China). Terrorism has been a constant
in history in the rest of the world since the beginning. Supra, p. 28, 29..

[586] A
clear swing in thought towards manpower from technology. Firepower ineffective
against terrorists. Army should get a bigger share of the defense budget,
America must expect to fight protracted, enervating counter-insurgency wars
that offer no clear-cut victories and risk the prospect of humiliation. So
avoid smallish wars of choice, but strengthen local allies (Afghanistan and
Iraq by embedding western soldiers who can call in airstrikes, and help
organize civil reconstruction. Economist, October 27, Nov. 2, p. 15

[603] All
five official nuclear weapons states are now signed up to an Additional
Protocol (Britain, China, France and Russia), with India to follow soon), so
the agency’s moral power will grow. Iran will sign if, and when, the UN
Security Council (which backs the
inspectors) abandons efforts to half its suspect nuclear program.Economist,
1/10/09, p. 53.

[606] What
to do with a vision of zero, The Economist, 11/15/2008, p. 73

[607] While
it’s true that Israel’s nuclear weapon is seen to protect it against others,
their other military force is so dominant, preventing all Arab military
advances (see p. 276, Pollack, A Path…), that it is an unnecessary addition for
their security. A Path Out of the Desert, + or – p 50, by Kenneth M Pollack

[608] Jonathan
Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger, Henry Holt &
Co., 2007; also see Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the
Nuclear Arms Race, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007

[609]America’s
efforts will be viewed skeptically since the U.S. assisted Great Britain’s
efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, surreptitiously aided France’s winked at
Israel’s (and perhaps even more than winked”), acquiesced in China’s, India’s
and Pakistan’s. This must be done by universal agreement since
one-country-at-a-time approach will sponsor resengtment and a rush to go
nuclear. Zbigniew Brzezinski, supra, p. 32.

[624] Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations)
says fundamentalist movements come out of "young, college-educated,
middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons"
"because the processes of economic modernization and social change
throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities,
weakening the nation state as a source of identity. Identity can then be found,
in their view, in Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well
as in Islam." It's hard to think of a better demonstration that the youth
OF THE WORLD require religion! For a party to run in the U.S. without a note of
religion, I claim, would not only lose the election, it would lose the youth of
the world. The fact that Huntington says cultural differences (many of them
religious) have caused and will be the cause the future conflicts in the world
(whether within countries or country v. country) further points out that, in
international relations, understanding "of the basic religious and
philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which
people in those civilizations see their interests" will be required to
efficiently enter only those conflicts in which there are not cultural
conflicts. It will require an effort (by U.S. policymakers) to identify
elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. In this
conflict-laden context it's obvious that "selective engagement"
militarily by the U.S. is the only way to avoid military
"exhaustion". There's no end to the disagreements between existing
cultures and those won't soon end. For the relevant future, there will be no
universal civilization, but instead a world of different civilizations, each of
which will have to learn to coexist with the others."

[633] President George W. Bush’s
illegally invaded Iraq in 2003. It was that invasion and the ensuing occupation
that hurtled Iraq and – to an extent – Syria into their current chaos. But the
emerging neocon-preferred narrative is that the jihadist victory in Mosul and
the related mess in neighboring Syria are the fault of President Barack Obama
for not continuing the U.S. military occupation of Iraq indefinitely and for
not intervening more aggressively in Syria’s civil war. After Islamic militants
captured the major Iraqi city of Mosul on June 16, 2014. Most striking about
such accounts (across the major U.S. media), is that the narrative doesn’t go
back to the most obvious starting point: prior negotiation WAS successful,
Surges were not successful. The invasions was a clear violation of
international law, lacking the explicit approval of the United Nations Security
Council. Yet, even after the false tales of Weapons of Mass Destruction were
exposed and the body counts soared, there was almost no accountability enforced
either on the public officials who carried out the aggressive war or on the
opinion leaders who rationalized. THERE WAS NO Al-Qaeda threat in Iraq or Syria
until President George W. Bush’s illegal invasionand the Bush administration’s
rash decision to disband the Iraqi army. Then, as U.S. forces fought to crush
Sunni resistance to Iraq’s new U.S.-backed Shiite-dominated government, Iraq
became a magnet for Sunni extremists from across the Middle East, a force that
coalesced into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

[641] American
voters see the ‘success’ of the surge as more reason to bring them home
NYT,1/20/08. p. 11; the U.S. occupation of Iraq has boosted the Shiite
religious achievements when its jihadist, fundamentalist, movement appeared to
be losing momentum. Supra, Zbigniew Brzezinski, p. 53; and internal unrest in
Middle Eastern states should be deterred by better schools, more opportunities
for youth, wider social justice and more inclusive, accountable government, not
more war NYT Book Review, p. 1

Restoring
the government after Bush-Cheney: Notes from Emily, September 2007: reverse

a)deputies
delivering PowerPoint presentations targeting Democrats in congressional
elections to employees t as many as 19 federal agencies or departments,
including the Peace Corps, the Department of Education, the EPA and the State
Department;

b)putting
executive from the coal and nuclear industries in charge of environmental
policy; appointing lobbyists from the mining industry to work at the Department
of the Interior; and selecting people with ties to the lead industry to sit on
the Center for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead
Poisoning.

c)Choosing
a woman who had actively opposed the violence Against Women Act to head the
National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women, and nominating a
physician who had refused to prescribe contraceptives to unmarried women to
chair the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee;

[657] Pakistani
leader Ahmed Shah Massoud said the U.S. had walked away from Afghanistan,
leaving its people bereft p. 9; Terrorism is theater, and bin Laden, having
specialized in media for years, is winning the ‘show’. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars,
2004

[663] Economist,
July 14, 2007, p. 15; Staying in Iraq, secrecy, paternalism and ‘war’, instead
of alerting the heroic citizenry to build optimistic resilience against
terrorism, inserts a climate of fear and a sense of powerlessness in the face
of adversity which undermines faith in American ideals and fuels political
demagoguery, particularly after two decades of taxpayer rebellion have stripped
away the means necessary for government workers to provide help during
emergencies and weakened the necessary infrastructure. The British, and our war
bond drives, responded to the bombing of London as we should respond now.
Stephen Flynn, Foreign Affairs, March/April 2008, p. 2

[666] Dreams
and Shadows, by Robin Wright, Penguin Books, London, p. 3. Violence is
increasingly unacceptable to the majority. p. 5 The disastrous miscalculations
in Iraq are slowing the process of moving toward democracy. p. 10 The most
incredible demonstration that the U.S. doesn’t want democracy is that the West
cut off aid to the Palestinians after Hamas’s victory at the polls. p. 57

[667]Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Choice, Basic Books, 2007,
p. 229. Every dollar spend on active, preventive intelligence is probably worth
more than ten dollars spend on across-the-board but essentially blind upgrading
of security at potential terrorist targets. We should upgrade technological
surveillance and prompt detection of suspect activities, more effectively
recruit persons to penetrate hostile foreign governments and terrorist
organizations, and do aggressive covert activities to disrupt and terminate
hostile foreign governments and terrorist organizations plots at an early
stage.

[681] Recall
that previous tax cuts provide limited bang for the deficit buck: only about
30% of the 2007 tax rebates were spent. The impact could probably be larger
now, partly because more households are strapped for cash and because a
permanent boost in income is more likely to be spent than a one-time rebate.
The Economist, 12/13/2008 p. 34

[687] and
argue to seniors that the best way to convince the young (including increasing
numbers of minorities) is to TEACH them your way of thinking. NYT 5/17/07

[688]Lower and middle class tax cut recipients spend it,
and create an economy. But the benefit of the last tax cut was for higher
income people who don’t spend it and therefore create a less large economy.
Income at the 99th percentile rose 87%; at the 99.9 percentile it
rose 181% and income at the 99.9 percentile rose 48%; we have a rising
oligarchy. (one wag said “The depression is when all the money returned to its
rightful owners”); Alan Greenspan reportedly has warned that growing inequality
poses a threat to “democratic society”. 18 million families got nothing while
183,000 millionaires had their taxes slashed by $93,000. Failure to spend
causes recessions.

Paul
Volcker, appointed by both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, said 75% chance of
financial crisis in the next five years. If you want more equality of wealth,
to continue as a democracy and healthier life, Bill Gates, Sr., writes “During
periods of less wealth inequality, our country has strengthened (underline
supplied) equality of opportunity, particularly for access to education for
people of modest means. This is…a precondition for electoral democracy. Life is better if income is more equal.
Within the United States, counties and states with greater inequality have the
highest infant mortality, heart disease, cancer, and homicide. Regions with
greater equality of income have longer life expectancies and less violent
trauma. p. 20-23, Wealth and Commonwealth, Gates, William Sr. and Collins
Chuck, Beacon Press Books, 2002

[691] His
political compromise that shored up SS finances in 1982-3 enacted a
multitrillion-dollar tax increase on America’s wage works, with no current
benefits to match it. Social Security
taxes are the most regressive taxes we have instead of supplementing payroll
taxes with more progressive GENERAL revenues, as Roosevelt’s architects of
Social Security had recommended n 1935, they relied on far higher payroll
taxes. Worst of all, this was exactly the money that underwrote George W.
Bush’s several rounds of tax cuts for the richest. The ”surplus” that Bush
raided to finance his tax breaks was mainly the Social Security reserves.

As a result of the several tax cuts sponsored by
Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, the tax code is now only very marginally
redistributive. Given the widening disparity in pretax income as the economy
has become privatized, deregulated, and globalized, it would take serious
increases in progressive taxation and compensatory social outlay to offset the
greater pretax inequality of income and wealth. However, far from using the
public sector to lean against the wind, the Right’s program of tax cuts to the
upper rackets, coupled with the cynical strategy of permanent structural
deficits, has caused social outlay to e reduced while reinforcing the extremes
of pretax incomes. Domestic spending relative to GDP is not back down to the level
of the 1950s, and most of what remains is Social Security and Medicare. This
shift in burdens and benefits reinforces conservative politics. Robert Kuttner,
supra, p. 52-53

[701] Bill
Gates Sr. suggests we use the revenue to fund Social Security “Wealth and
Commonwealth”, p. 3. It’s not double taxation because the inheritance is
primarily real property and stock values which have never been taxed before. p.
83. Survivors don’t lose because the marital deduction protects from collection
until the surviving spouse dies. p. 128 States are currently losing essential
estate tax dollars due to the law, so the federal government has just cut money
for schools and the states’ other bills. p. 11, 12.

[702] Net
lifetime taxes should take our of our children’s income roughly the same
proportion as they take out of our income i.e. the Bible says take more from
those who have more, don’t tax the poor the same. Under this plan poor
households would pay no sales taxes in net terms; the reform would eliminate
the highly regressive FICA tax and would effectively tax wealth as well as
wages, because, when the rich spend their wealth and when workers spend their
wages, they would both pay sales taxes. It would shift spending away from
consumption goods and services into investment goods, which will help the
economy grow through time (as done in China and Japan).

[715] Reductions in ozone,
particulate matter, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and lead.
Reductions in these pollutants have been particularly impressive: down by 63
percent while the gross domestic product grew by 128 percent. Emissions of
carbon dioxide, which was unregulated, went up by 21 percent over this same
period; A national pollution cap for greenhouse gases is urgently needed -- it
would serve as the engine that drives pollution reductions under all Clean Air
Act programs and as a science-based standard to guide all climate policy;

[718] Extend the renewable-energy
production tax credit proposed by President Bush 43 in 1992). Texas alone
produces more electricity through wind power than all but five countries; $1.6b
annually has helped make the U.S. wind industry second only to China’s as the
world’s largest It installed 50 gigawatts. That w ould displace 44 coal-fired
power plants or 11 nuclear- powered plants. Congress allowed three previous
lapses of this credit; investment dries up without the subsidy supported by Republicans
Sen. Grassley and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R TX). Wind provides 7000 jobs in Iowa
and 20% of the state’s power. It’s already too late to save 2026 jobs in wind
but continuation would create 37,000; also take out the $2.7b to $44b/year oil
subsidies;

[721] Paul
Krugman, NYT 9/26/09, p. A25; also, Senators John Kerry and Lindsey Graham have
proposed aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases. This will
minimize the impact on major emitters through a market-based system that will
provide both flexibility and time for big polluters to come into compliance
without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas.. Solar
will be the means eventually chosen. Solar Revolution, The Economic
Transformation of the Global Energy Industry, Treavis Bradford, The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass, London, England, 2006. We should also consider a border tax on
goods produced in countries that avoid environmental standards. NYT, October
11, 2009, p. 11

[731] Regardless
of the specific timing of when each user or market adopts PV, the global trend
toward adopting solar energy will continue until PV system installations become
a substantial segment of annual new construction of electricity-generating
capacity worldwide. By the second or third decade of this century, most new
electricity-generation capacity will likely be in the form of renewable (non
hydro) energy from a variety of sources, and new nuclear and fossil-fuel
generators will probably no longer e economic to build owing to the large
number of cheaper and cleaner option that will be available to both utilities
and end users of electricity. BP is already one of the top producers of PV
worldwide..p. 163 Mobilizing fuel cells in cars and trucks ultimately will rely
on the deployment of renewable energy and the clean, local, and cheap
generation of hydrogen. p. 168 The photovoltaic fuel cell is rapidly growing
with renewable–energy technology in Germany and Japan. Solar-energy support
programs, including rebates, feed-in tariffs, and R&D support programs are
being used in addition to collaborative efforts to standardize equipment and
connection methods, educate PV system installers, and access capital markets.
P.171. Incentives for the production and installation of renewable-energy
alternatives must occur as well as feed-in tariffs, net metering, rebate
programs, consumer tax deductions and production tax credits. Subsidies and tax
breaks to competing sources must be ended while extractive and polluting
fossil-fuel energy sources should be penalized p.173. Solar Revolution: The
Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry, Bradford, Travis, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass, London, England 2006

[732]Rainforest destruction
decreased 70%. 1) HALVE the distances people DRIVE each year; 2) double vehicle fuel economy; making electric
cars; 3) cover five million acres of land with solar panels; 4)
construct two million one-megawatt wind turbines to generate electricity; could
provide a quarter of all the electricity the US produces annually); extend the
renewable-energy production tax credit (“W” proposed in 1992); wind provides
7000 jobs in Iowa and 20% of the state’s power; 5) pass Rep Waxman’s and Rep.
Markey’s bill to cut carbon emissions 20% by 2020 and 80% by 2050; 6) adopt
Senator Maria Cantwell’s ‘cap-and-dividend’ plan instead of a carbon tax or
cap-and-trade. It’s a ceiling on carbon emissions each year, a requirement that
producers and importers of fossil fuels will buy permits raising vast sums of
money which would be divided evenly among all Americans. Energy prices would
rise but the family of four would receive $1000 a year to cover the increase.
As a fall-back position, support the regional cap and trade plan of the seven state, four province,
Western Climate Initiative, using the stakeholders’ Climate Advisory Team’s
fifteen recommendations. Stress funding fees, cap and trade, transit and
environmental efficiency. Implement it gradually although electricity would
become more expensive since coal-fired plants are used, cap-and-trade permits
should be passed and auctioned. The cap-and-trade bill on the House floor May
24 established a program to control climate-altering emissions, dictates an
increase in the uses of renewable energy sources, sets new efficiency standards
for buildings, lighting and industrial facilities. It also calls for a 17%
reduction in emissions of heat-trapping gases form 2005 levels by 2820 and 83%
by 2050. We may add the here-to-for
avoided bill of strict government regulations, state-of-the-art technology and
a federal tax on every ton of harmful emissions or slapping a tax on energy
consumption that befouls the public square or leaves the nation hostage to
foreign oil producers. Clinton lost, but he proposed in 1993, a tax on all
forms of energy; 7) dramatically increase the efficiency of buildings and
fossil-fueled power stations, using displaced labor, throughout, to ‘go green’;
8) stop the destruction of tropical forests; dramatically increase tree cover
elsewhere;

Also,
regulate greenhouse gases under existing EPA laws;

develop clear environmental standards
for extracting natural gas from shale. Avoid the temptation to install gas,
taking from solar, wind and nuclear, although lured by the fact that burning it
releases roughly half as much carbon dioxide as burning coal. The current Republican energy “NO”
illustrates their allergy to science and scientists like Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton and Einstein. It’s like the tobacco industry claiming tobacco does NOT
cause cancer.

invest in 1,400 new gas power plants to
produce electricity, then choose between injecting billions of tons of carbon
dioxide underground or using less toxic fuel;

use ‘carbon rationing’: Just as people
were better off and healthier in Britain under food rationing during WWII, most
of us would see a dramatic improvement in our quality of life if were
introduced by the government. We would build a different society emphasizing
quality of life over raw statistics of economic growth and relentless
consumerism;

support Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)
initiatives put the right regulatory incentives to ensure that America is
China’s main competitor research and technology development in the ET (Energy
Technology) revolution. China has started the “Green Leap Forward”. We must
respond with a tax on carbon to match their 20 new planned nuclear plants, its
$5b investment using California-based technology, the drop in price from $.53
to $.16 cents per kwh and their high speed rail;

allow California to set its own emissions
standards. We should quit using coal by 2030 and the US should quit
sooner;

cut energy needs by living less
consumptive lifestyles;

adopt more localized patterns of behavior;

double the quantity of wind turbines (see 4, above); Iowa, Oregon and
Illinois are also building wind power generators

use geothermal; plants are being built in
Nevada; Boise’s energy is geothermal;

[734] Britain,
for example, proposed a bill that sets carbon-reduction goals by law for power
generation, transport, manufacturing, with the ultimate goal of cutting
emissions by 80% from their 1990 levels by 2050.The Economist, 11/22/2008, p.
66

[737] Republican
EPA chiefs say their president is wrong about global warming (Ruckelshaus and
Train); 212 mayors of major cities have agreed to obey the Kyoto treaty by
reducing carbon gases to 1990 levels;

Edward Norton, arranging with BP that every celebrity who installed a BP
solar system in his or her home would get a similar system donated by BP to a
poor L.A. family Paul Polizzotto, who had shown dozens of companies how to cut
emissions of heat-trapping gases and
SAVE money

Governors
Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Pataki

Fortune 500 companies, including
General Electric, Duke Energy and J P Morgan Chase have championed stronger
government measures to reduce industrial releases of carbon dioxide; also
Dupont, United Technologies Baxter International, IBM, General Motors and
Johnson & Johnson give subsidies for nuclear power and other types of
cleaner electricity sources follow recommendations of the National Commission
on Energy Policy (bipartisan); Green Seattle Partnership aims to restore more
than 2,500 acres of forested parkland in the city over the next 20 years; GOING
GREEN IS GOOD FOR BOTTOM LINE: by combining business practices to the limits of
nature, companies can reduce their impact on the environment: reusable
products, high emission standards, healthy employee relations and transparency
in the way companies do business Seattle Great City Initiative; Starbucks
recycled cabinetry and furniture, Nike shoes can be disassembled easily, making
cushy playground surfaces, factories closer to employees’ villages, Toyota,
Home Depot, Wal-Mart, REI, PCC Natural Markets:

BP wants to live up to it’s “Beyond
Petroleum” name: want to tear into the artificial environment the way our
ancestors tore into the natural one

governmental leaders, conservationists and
neighborhood activists) wrote the 100 year plan of

conserved landscapes and vibrant
towns; it lays out a series of pragmatic marketplace strategies for the region
to consider in order to make this vision a reality: bringing market-based
conservation tools to a region-wide scale and applying them to conserve
critical landscapes; some development rights were given, but 13 million acres
preserved

212 Mayors of major cities have agreed to obey the
Kyoto treaty by reducing carbon gases to 1990 levels

[748] Gore
proposes: a pollution tax, an immediate
freeze on carbon-dioxide emissions with sharp reductions in future years,
stricter vehicle mile-per-gallon rules, moratorium on construction of highly
polluting coal-fired power plants, a strong global climate-change treaty and
the creation of federally operated Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association that
would serve as an incentive for building energy-efficient homes, pointing out
that rising global temperatures could cause polar ice to melt, sea levels to
rise, increase the likelihood of droughts, wildfires and intense hurricanes.

[749] About
100b bags are thrown away each year; it can take 1000 years for a plastic bag
to break down in a landfill NYT 4/5/08, D1

[750] We
do not gain energy independence by overwhelming foreign agriculture with our
subsidized crops; in fact, the transportation emissions, worsen the environment,
require EXTRA energy and cost more; so farmers markets are better, for the
environment, the foreign economy, social stability, reduced immigration and
national security.

[752] * RE
Arizona anti-immigrant law of 2010, the Phoenix area, alone, is projected to
lose $92m in business per Newsweek, 8/10/2010, p. 34

Generally, Hispanics are 8.9% of WA population. In 2007; immigration
ranks near the bottom, the top issue for only 4 or 5% of voters who do not
realize Mexico lost half its territory in 1846-1848 war with the U.S..

To start with a great story, the Hinojosas have been hoeing and picking sugar beets in
Breckenridge Minnesota for 30 years, Blaufuss
now consider them family and fill the freezer for them when they are
coming, considering them ‘family’. Minerva, one child, has graduated from the
University of Texas, Pan American, others have joined the Air Force, the Navy,
and a son, David, works in the migrant education program Minerva first attended
when she came north where her family starts hoeing at 5:30 am. NYT 8/5/2007, p.
12

After 2007 failure of immigration bill, next steps,
in smaller bill or bills: 1) point system only as a supplement, not substitute,
for family provisions: 2) in technology to increase the H1B visas for
scientists, will ask more temporary visas (previous expired, reducing from
195,000 to 65000 year); 3) the to-win-conservative-votes sections DID NOT (so
forget them); in agriculture, allow rotting crops to be picked; end raids and
detentions that separate families and shatter businesses; give orderly flow of
workers with an opportunity for visas, tuition breaks for immigrant children
and an earned path to citizenship; after open advertising for workers in
America

Europeans WANT immigrants, so they have cover for One
of the underlying question, according to a blog author, is that a needlessly
cumbersome guest-worker plan and a costly war on gatecrashers are bad
ideas---even if you don’t care about the welfare of the would-be immigrants. Economist,
June 2, 2007, p. 83

[757] Forgotten
Continent, The Battle for Latin America’s Soul, Reid, Michael, p. 3; now mainly
urban, statist regulation shed although state and public institutions
unchanged, moderate, lagging in competitiveness, innovation and friendliness to
business, greater effort tackling poverty and inequality Many ‘illegal’
immigrants are the 25 to 40% who entered LEGALLY but overstayed their visas.
And detaining and removing 12 million people would cost at least $94b. Less
than 3% of immigrants receive foot-stamps, One in four U.S. public companies
that received venture capital in the last 15 years was started by an immigrant
and creating a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants will ensure that
more SS and income taxes will be paid to the federal and state governments by
newly legalized workers, costing the economy and helping to fund the SS and
Medicare systems The National Voter, October 2008, p. 9

[758] The
underlying mission (of We Are America Alliance and Democracy Summer) is to have
minority voters and new naturalized citizens vote out the
immigrant-bashers. There are more than a
dozen swing states with anywhere from 50,000 to 900,000 legal residents
eligible to apply for citizenship. The voter pool is increasing by leaps and
bounds. In 2005, more than 600,000 citizenship applications were approved and
the number is expected to increase to 685,000 this year; as a think piece, the
Declaration on Immigrant Rights requests the legalization of all immigrants,
residence with civil and lab or rights, stop the deportations, liberty and
justice for all (not marginalization), against a guest-worker program
militarization of the borders.

The facts are that remittances to Mexico exceed
$20b/yr, the second largest source of external finance and that roughly 20m
Mexican-origin workers in America create a larger gross product than Mexico
itself. Perversely, stepped up attempts to keep illegal immigrants out of the
Us have resulted in a migrant population more likely to stay…it’s difficult to
return if you leave.

[765] (Federal
Judge Breyer injunction against implementation of the rule requiring SSA to
send out ‘no match’ letters because administration did not giving any legal
explanation nor conduct a

survey of the cost and impact for small businesses.
He noted that the SS inspector general estimated that 17m of the agency’s 435m
individual records contained discrepancies that would result in a no-match
letter being sent out to a legally authorized worker. NYT 10/11/07 p. A22

78% of Americans favored earned citizenship

New York Times, July 31, 2006; many companies cannot
function AS THEY CHOOSE without immigrants. 13,000 immigrants were taken from
Swift and Co., beef and pork processor, which followed the federal rules, and
deported…no indication American workers would take their jobs. NYT editorial
12/18/06

[766] Help
opponents of immigration to understand that hard and underpaid work, long
hours, and poor living conditions is unfair and ought to be prevented. Allowing
immigration avoids the unfairness without taking Americans’ jobs. Feeling that
immigrants are wrong is just like 1882, when
“whites saw in Chinese workers precisely what they hated about their own
lives: underpaid work, long hours, poor living conditions and no way to earn in
their own countries. Then, our country had to be forced to obey it’s own laws
to avoid migrant workers unrelenting confrontation with human cruelty. Let us
acknowledge that nothing has immunized us against the unhappy effect that
economic disappointment works on the soul, or against the temptation to find
scapegoats to hold responsible for deeper problems (we took their land by war
and now we subsidize others so their jobs at home, producing farm products,
can’t pay). NYT Book Review, July 27, 2007, “Driven Out: The Forgotten War
Against Chinese Americans”, p 7

[767] Both
Arizonian agitators against illegal immigration, J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf,
lost their House races

“most
Mexican immigrants (12m illegal) would work in the U.S. only sporadically and
for limited period of time.” “even those with legal documents don’t necessarily
intend to stay” Douglas Massey, Mexican Migration Projects;citizen resentment of immigrants is alleged
to be that they don’t want to STAY (New Republic 5/8/06 p. 14), but that’s
nothing new since, in prior immigrations, approximately 33% of those arriving
from Southern and Eastern Europe actually returned to their native countries;
Time poll says 63% believe “illegals take jobs away from U.S. citizens”, but
U.S. unemployment is at 4.7%, which is as low as it ever gets, so jobs aren’t
being taken; 60% say “overburden government programs and
services”; CA Initiative 187, to limit “overburdening”, passed by 60%
(including 25% latinos), but was rejected by courts and sunk Rs in backlash;
Mexicans fleeing dead-end farming, rural banditry and urban squalor plus the
discriminatory policies of the U.S., raisings the level of federal subsidies by
more than 80% over 10 years, blocking Mexican fair competition in soybeans,
corn and wheat; U.S. subsidies per farm, per the Economist, may soon reach
three to four times European levels. Mexico has become a captive market in
which it’s farmers cannot successfully compete against American subsidies;
tariffs will not be eliminated on U.S.-grown corn until 2008, but then the U.S.
will unleash an avalanche of cheap, subsidized corn; wheat production in Mexico
has already fallen by 60% since 1980; soybeans by 33%; and Mexican farmers’
costs are higher than those in the U.S.; the NAFTA boom for industrial workers
never materialized in Mexico and wages for Mexican factory workers have
DECLINED; Mexico should focus state attention on improving the productivity and
welfare of the small farm sector; U.S. is giving PATENTS in sterile seeds
(terminator technology) so no foreign country can continue its prior crop
without buying new seeds from Americans, and is giving exclusive rights to
market enola beans, which were a prior crop from Mexico.

7/21/06: immigration may be decisive nationally since
all California voters won’t ever support a Pete Wilson campaign against the
“over the fencers”, especially is Democrats use Spanish-speaking radio as
effectively as Bush did in 2004

IMMIGRATION GIVES US CHEAPER FOOD AND HELPS MORE WORKING
FAMILIES

it was a restrictive immigration act, 1924, attempting to
protect America admitted to the U.S. for “pure Americans”, that prevented Jews
fleeing the Holocausts from being admitted to America

[768] The
current senate bill would allow 12 million current illegal immigrants to stay
in the U.S. only after stringent border-control provisions (triggers) are
implemented. Migrants participating in a new guest-worker program would have to
leave the country after their short-term work visas expire, with no way to
petition for permanent residence, but illegal immigrants who arrived before
January 1, 2007 could remain in the U.S. on probationary status and renew
four-year visas , eventually obtain a green card (8 years) if the heads of
households return to their home countries first. A key unknown is whether the
agency handling four year visa applications promises not to share information
with deportation officers, which was made in 1986. Other provisions would
strengthen penalties and create a merit-based system for future immigration.
NYT 5/16/07 on negotiations; 5/19/07 ST

[778] Generally:
Differences: “Tonight every one of you knows deep in your heart that we are too
divided. It is time to heal America. (we have so many competing denominations
we must find allies to drive toward agendas of a wider multi-faith audience. It
would fit. Worldwide most religious movements are now pluralist and moderate.
It’s flexible, user-friendly and market-driven. Rural immigrants can get a
social-support network and a moral code that cements their way The Agenda,
Atlantic, March 2008, p. 21.

And so we must say to every American: Look beyond the
stereotypes that blind us…We don’t have a person to waste, and yet for too long
politicians have told the most of us that ware doing all right that what’s
really wrong with America is the rest of us---them. Them, the minorities. Them,
the liberals. Them, the poor. Them, the homeless. Them, the people with
disabilities. Them, the gays. We’ve
gotten to where we’ve nearly them’ed ourselves to death. Them, and them, and
them.
But this is America. There is no them. There is only us. One nation,
under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. That is our Pledge of
Allegiance. Clinton, 1992 Democratic Convention

Race: run an ad showing the newsreel of Thurmond’s
words (Ladies and gentlemen…there’s not enough troops in the Army to force the
Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our
theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.” Then
Lott’s unambiguous comment supporting it, followed by photos associating Lott
and Thurmond with every incumbent R Senator who either voted for him or said
nothing publicly afterward…which is every R Senator who voted to restore Lott
to a position of leadership in 2006 (Westen, p. 221)

One-third of evangelicals in 2004 voted for
Democrats, many of them complaining about corruption.

The very
nature of political talk in this country makes it difficult to discuss the
relationship between morality and politics at all. The separation of church and
state has implicitly left the church as the *institution that is seen as guarding
morality even though morality is too important to be left to churches. It has
been assumed that all political discussions are issue-oriented and morally
neutral. Once one brings morality into issue-oriented discussion, the whole
matter of legislating morality is brought to the fore. Conservative support by
right-wing churches raises the messy question of how one can discuss morality
while maintaining the separation between church and state. There must be a
public discourse on morality, with an adequate vocabulary to show the
difference between the moral systems that lie behind liberal and conservative
political positions. Liberalism itself has a view of discourse that puts it at
a disadvantage. Liberalism comes from an Enlightenment tradition of supposedly
literal, rational, issue-oriented discourse, a tradition of debate using
“neutral” conceptual resources. Most liberals assume that metaphors are just
matters of words and rhetoric, or that they cloud the issues, or that metaphors
are the stuff of Orwellian language. If liberals are to create an adequate
moral discourse to counter conservatives, they must get over their view that
all thought is literal and that straightforward rational literal debate on an
issue is always possible The idea is false---empirically false---and if
liberals stick to it they will have little hope of constructing a discourse
that is a strong moral response to conservative discourse. Moral Politics,
George Lakoff, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 387. This approach is critical to our future
constituency, per Samuel Huntington (Clash of Civilizations), who says
fundamentalist movements come out of "young, college-educated,
middle-class technicians, professionals and business persons"
"because the processes of economic modernization and social change
throughout the world are separating people from longstanding local identities,
weakening the nation state as a source of identity, and that they are found in
Western Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as in Islam."
(It's hard to think of a better demonstration that the youth OF THE WORLD
require religion! For a party to run in the U.S. without a note of religion, I
claim, would not only lose the election, it would lose the youth of the world).
The fact that Huntington says cultural differences (much of them religious)
have caused and will be the cause the future conflicts in the world (whether
within countries or country v. country) further points out that, in
international relations, understanding "of the basic religious and
philosophical assumptions underlying other civilizations and the ways in which
people in those civilizations see their interests" will be required to
effficiently enter only those conflicts in which there are not cultural
conflicts. It will require an effort (by U.S. policymakers) to identiify
elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations. In this
conflict laden context it's obvious that "selective engagement"
militarily by the U.S. is the only way to avoid military "exhaustion".
There's no end to the disagreements between existing cultures and those won't
soon end. For the relevant future, there will be no universal civilization, but
instead a world of different civilizations, each of which will have to learn to
coexist with the others."

(embracing and extending the Contract with America) Consider the Network of
Spiritual Progressives, Lerner, Michael, The Left Hand of God. p. 227.

“Our Spiritual Covenant”:

We are proud of our accomplishments since
independence in 1776: shared values, democratic process, elimination of slavery
and segregation, welcome to refugees, reduction of sexist practices in our
economy and personal lives, challenge of discrimination and increase of
commitment to human rights around the world. We propose love, generosity,
kindness, responsibility respect, gratitude, humility, honesty, awe, and wonder
at the grandeur of the universe, all beyond selfishness and materialism.
Productivity can and will mean family love, caring for our neighbors, kindness
and generosity, peace and social justice, ethically and ecologically
responsible behavior. All families deserve a living wage, full employment,
affordable high-quality child care, affordable health care, access to excellent
education, starting with preschool, and flexible work schedules. Employment
shall use the same values and help us teach them to our workers and children.

We do not rely on government to rectify aspects that
could be changed through individual or community effort.

We honor each other as created as embodiments of the
sacred. We build lives driven by higher meaning and purpose.

We respect the privacy of others, using our words to
enhance caring.

We respect diversity, honor those with whom we
disagree, and forgive those who offend us.

We will break through loneliness and alienation of
others, eliminate poverty, ensure full employment, provide for public safety
and require enactment and regulation for the PUBLIC good.

We reward institutions, including corporations, which
promote the value of caring for others.

We will propose a Social Responsibility Amendment to
the Constitution that requires corporations to apply for new corporate charter
every ten years, only to those which can demonstrate to a jury of ordinary
citizens a satisfactory record of social responsibility.

We will present a values-based education.

Everyone deserves affordable health care…a
single-payer system which allows us to choose our doctors and to have physical,
mental, emotional and spiritual care.

We will joyously preserve the earth and reverse the
damage done. We will build systems to release us from dependence on fossil
fuels and to live in a more sustainable manner, encourage family planning to
reduce population growth, support ways to reduce over-consumption and
dramatically reduce pollutants.

We value safety and security.

The US will join with other advanced industrial
societies in creating a Global Marshall Plan.

We will reduce dramatically the role of money in elections,
eliminate the electoral college, guarantee access to the media for all
candidates and perspectives.

We will make the world safer by building strong
international institutions and a standing international nonviolent force that
can intervene where necessary to protect populations from genocide. We will
dramatically reduce nuclear armaments and seek global disarmament of
conventional weapons as well. As a first step, we will replace all U.S forces
in Iraq with an international force that will conduct a plebiscite among all
three ethnic communities to determine whether and how they stay together as one
country or become independent states.

We will generously fund and promote scientific
research and will not allow the priorities of science to be set by the
corporate marketplace or scientific research to be restricted by religious or
political dogma.

[779] So it’s not realistic to take
the steps which would have prevented the 2008 recession: limiting
securitization, limiting home equity loans, limiting ATM cash withdrawals and
limiting dispersion of credit cards.

[780] The millennials’ movement
away from organized religion has recently accelerated. Between 2005 and 2011,
the fraction of non-religious has declined 2% but has decreased five times as
much among younger voters. The Tea Party’s members desire for a godlier
government is out of step with the voters. God and Ceasar in America: Why
Mixing Religion and Politics Is Bad for Both, Campbell, David E. and Putnam,
Robert D.

[783] The
Republican National Committee sent a flyer to voters in West Virginia and
Arkansas that said if a Democrat won, they’d ban the Bible. The Democrats (John
Edwards) responded swiftly. They issued a press releases calling on President
Bush to apologize, saying “he should condemn the practice immediately and tell
everyone associated with the campaign to never use tactics like this again.
Senator Blanche Lincoln (D, Ark) and Robert Byrd (D, WV) issued critical
response, but a couple of speeches and a press release hardly match the power of
a mass mailing.

[784] Posner,
Richard A.., The Crisis of 08 and the Descent Into Depression, Harvard
University Press, 2009. It’s not JUST bad regulation nor deregulation. Canada
did better by capping leverage at 20 to 1 and therefore avoided the need for
bailouts. Another was failure to take into account asset prices, as well as
lending needs, when setting monetary policy. Diminished Returns, Niall
Ferguson, NYT Magazine, 5/17/09.

[785] Just
what Truman urged in 1948, so we’ve been there from the beginning after World
War II

[786] re
gays: say “Mr. Bush, that was one of the most un-Christian things I’ve every
seen a president of the United states do. The God I worship and the God most
Americans worship, is a God of love, not of hate, and He loves ALL his
children, not just the ones you deem worthy. And He would never countenance
building hatred into the sacred Constitution of the United States of America.
To divide Americans against American for political gain, and to dress it up in
the language of holiness, is an un-American as it is blasphemous.”

[787] re
whether John Edwards prays: “I prayed before my wife was diagnosed with breast
cancer and before my son died. No amount of prayer prevented those personal
disasters. I think it is enormously important to look to God—and, in my case,
Christ---for guidance and for wisdom. But I don’t think you can prevent bad
things from happening though prayer (he showed he is deeply religious and so
confident in the power of his convictions that he can separate them from his
role as a government official. He keeps those convictions where they belong: in
the personal realm and reality-based.

Another example,
indicating what Clinton might say: “I read it every day. And Lord knows every
day I fall short of the glory of God. But this book has a happy ending. It says
we don’t have to be perfect; just forgiven. But Lord, I’m having a hard time
forgiving our Republican brothers and sisters for accusing us of bannin’ the
Bible. Haven’t they read the Ninth Commandment” Let me read it to them. It’s
right here: Exodus 20:16, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbor.’ Before God Almighty, and with the Bible in my hand, I swear to you
we will never let anyone ban the Bible. And let me warn you. If we get four
more years of Republican economic policies; four more years of plant closings;
four more years of jobs going overseas; four more years of tax cuts for the
idle rich and more burden for the forgotten middle class, you‘re going to need
that Bible more than ever. Because we’re all going to be praying for
deliverance from these economic policies. We’re all going to be praying for
food to eat, a roof over our heads, and better to regulate the financial
markets than to bail them out with $95 billion when they’ve blown it. So I will
never, ever allow anyone to ban this Bible.”

[789] President
Reagan’s administration convinced voters to discriminate against blacks and
latinos so others would not be at the bottom of the pecking order. Alexander, Michelle,
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness2010, The New
Press

From
Colombia, Building Peace in a Time of War, by Virginia M. Bouvier, Editor
(2009)

Start with an open letter to all
after discovering the way that the local community establishes contacts,

limitations,
and agreed norms in its relations with local forces, perhaps offering
reparation, which

some
consider an essential element of reconciliation. Unconditional amnesty will not
sell.

To transform the conflict (DDP:
disarmament, demobilization and reintegration), go for non-military
peace-building partly because the right wing, business financed, paramilitaries
have a strong tendency to regard local communities axiomatically as supporters
of the guerrillas and so are the most difficult to quiet. Colombia worked by:

1)Negotiating, because the
Pentagon/military have proven, and knows, they cannot win militarily, and

2)developing ways the fighting forces
can have political input after settlement (so that they will be willing to
disarm)

Start
on the main problems they perceive: bad financial management, corruption,
political control by a small elite, lack of transparency, bad housing and bad
health services

Rely
on the indigenous city peace movements, which has worked in Colombia.

Then
turn to FARC’s developed Twelve Point Common Agenda, which will work so long as
needed changes in the status quo remain under discussion. Start with a prisoner
exchange Transformation will require substantial, not token, concessions. NGOs
will help peace (p. 372). Continue with ‘learning hope’ municipalities, work
and supplement periodic organized citizen participation and accountability
p.274 (which gives locals better overall
direction of policies for the city, and provide the benefits that participants
got out of developing the peace zone). Use rural education of children as a
long term base, since the people deeply believe that provides for the future
(and they may include discussions with youth about truth, justice, long-term
peace-building collective decisions, citizenship competencies, all with clear,
firm and non-authoritarian teaching styles for managing predefined or agreed
rules in classrooms, collective discussion for the constructive resolution of
interpersonal conflicts, to favor critical thinking and to stop aggression).
“Teach the respect for life they respond to. p.275, and sustainable
environmental projects, breaking down barriers between people, and demanding
projects breaking down armed groups.

To
end the military approach, argue that the taxpayer should not pay for a false
promise of superiority over the 30,000 right and left terrorists in Colombia
because a 10:1 superiority (300,000 troops) is known by military experts to be
required to defeat an indigenous force that size (p 375). Point out that the taxpayer pays an
overwhelming amount because it costs them 2-4 GDP pts/year to fight);

The
Colombian government has considerable experienced negotiating, as will be
required, with illegal armed groups. The Catholic Church will contribute help,
p. 419, having facilitated recent demobilization of paramilitaries in Colombia.
p.416 The private companies which were involved in the financing the
paramilitaries (because the paramilitaries are perceived as better than the
state) must be convinced peace is a better deal for them, too. The Church
helped with that in Colombia..

There
will be increased durability of the takeover from right/left ‘war’ if: 1) they
establish greater benefits to the armed actors because of the existence of the
fundamental source of the Zone of Peace ZoP); a more equal distribution of
benefits among rival armed actors; 3) lower levels of instability in the ZoP);
4) greater internal unity within the ZoP, especially regarding their objectives
and procedures; 5) more widespread grassroots participation in the
establishment and subsequent operation of ZoP; and 6) greater
interconnectedness of ZOP to similar bodies and to support organizations and
institutions.

Many
productive job opportunities and spaces for encounter, listening, consolation
and reconciliation must be created to use absorb the peoples’ energies. This
element has been missing in all state and US efforts.

Womens’
groups have been very effective organizers (building bridges across racial,
geographic, and class boundaries) with ability to leap the divisions in the
country (with help from Sweden, Netherlands, Switzerland) 422,428 They called for an end to fumigations which
are simultaneously destroying alternative crops as well as poisoning the
population and the environment.

Trade
unions, have helped, but the women are less frequently opposed. Both groups
successfully cross age, gender and ethnicity lines. Trade unions must attempt
to cross class lines too, although this is less likely easily to be received.

The
context: The central government is
suspected by the people of being just another armed actor p.434. US policies
fail at least because they are military (also, the Colombian military was
tutored and financed by 600 private company U.S. advisers who also designed and
implemented the failed Plan Patriota offensive because they established police
which are barely distinguishable from Colombia’s armed forces and because all
know the Pentagon is behind them. They are not supporting the essential
alternative economy to the poppy and coca crops. All U.S. entry is suspected
designed to take natural resources or lootable products.p.78

The
timing is good now (435) for IDPs (2,459,000 internally displaced peoples) but
proper implementation requires, before return to the communities they were
forced to flee, first establishing decision-making structures, committees, and
local associations so quick, effective government follows the Colombia model.
This is also a way of signaling to the guerrillas, paramilitaries and Colombia
armed forces that, on their return, the communities will no longer involve
themselves in the ongoing struggle
between the right, left, government and the U.S.

Before return, seek a populist, compelling
‘trigger event’ to energize the displaced peoples

Groups
working for reconciliation in Colombia are EU, REDPRODEPAZ, which has 429
municipalities p.271, UNDP p.219, p.305), REDES p.340,349, private industry
(ECOPETROL p.271), Catholic Church, AFSC, pacto localo de paz (REDEPAZ),
acercamienento (p.336, p.266, p.267); forget the ‘Plan Colombia” and
PLANPATRIOTA by US and Colombian government). These should be replicated in
Mexico successfully to return to widespread peace.

If that’s possible, legalizing and institutionalizing
the drug trade (as in England) would remove the profit incentive from fighting
and remove the income to buy war-making fni
P. 262:

After the establishment of the peace community, the
community addressed in an open letter to the local armed actors, arguing that
there’re was no longer any need for them to involved themselves in municipal
affairs and that they should allow the community to resolve its own problems
within the norms of a civilized society ‘We understand that one of the
principal ideas of those in arms is to respect the popular will and to strive
for peace with justice. This is a sufficient reason to demand respect for the
decision taken by the population of (name the city (Samaniego); the result was
that harassment of the mayor ended, and threats, kidnappings and incursions
aimed at the civil population all but ceased for a considerable time since the
local administration was being carried out in a transparent and participatory
manner. Forty years of oil exploration in Putumayo have failed to materialize
in social development, profits instead going into infrastructure for greater
extraction.

Approval by a guerrilla frente, however expressed, is
unlikely to sit well with a local paramilitary unit or the army brigade charged
with security in the department, and vice versa.

Fn ii Closer analysis may reveal whether different
types of relational problems arise for peace communities in different types of
conflicting environments, such as: 1) those stably controlled by one dominant
armed actor; 2) those previously dominated by now challenged by an alternative
armed actor; 3) those constantly in contention between armed actors; 4) those
subject to efforts to reclaim territory by a previously dominant armed actor’;
and 5) those controlled by a newly dominant armed actor consolidating its hold.

Set up a powerfully innovative and integral approach
to peace-building that having a minga (indigenous guard) and planes de vida
(economic, social and cultural strategies) , protection of their territorial
integrity, their stance of noninvolvement with armed actors, and peaceful
community coexistence; prohibit use as transport routes, commercial corridors,
or refuges for the activities of any armed agents, and stop government forces
from compromising the indigenous communities’ stance of noninvolvement. Require
armed actors to refrain from forced recruitment, bombardments, raids, and used
a broad consultative process with potentially affected indigenous populations.

Fniii The new list of proposals called for a
negotiated solution to the armed conflict; reform of the armed forces; greater
independence of the judiciary; budgetary realignments that would favor social
welfare and scientific research; nationalization and state management of the
energy sector, natural resources, communications, ports, roads, and public services; and progressive tax
policies. Other proposals dealt with agrarian reform, land redistribution, and
development policies, international relations based on self-determination and
regional integration, and renegotiation of foreign debt, contracts, and
natural-resource polities with multinational corporations. P. 88

[803] Support
lawsuits by injured lower and middle class people prevented from working by
injury (there has been a decline of 4% of lawsuits, whereas, more, 5% of
DEATHS, are due to injuries. The cause of insurance company recent higher costs
is NOT lawsuits. It is the insurance companies’ shriveling reserves and
declining investments earnings (the stock market [that the President wants to
put your Social Security in] turned sour. There’s no crisis of excessive medical
malpractice cases; juries decided in favor of the injured in just 560 cases;
307 cases were decided in favor of the doctors; 3,248 of the 10,000 cases were
closed without victims getting anything. The cost of malpractice insurance is
actually DECLINING in recent years; Washington State’s Insurance Commissioner
has just required the state’s largest insurance carrier (Physicians, which,
itself, reduced its premiums 7.7% for 2005) to refund more than $1.3 million
plus interest on excess premiums charged in 2004. The number of malpractice
claims increased by 4.9% a year, 40% of which would be accounted for by
population increase. Some estimates are that 5% of treatments are malpractice.
The average amount of the compensation per claim increased by 4.1% a year, well
below the rate of inflation in health care costs (ST 3/6/05)

[819] Commercial
station owners overwhelmingly favor conservative talkers over all others. Worse
than that, they interfere with foreign policy goals by, currently, depicting
Osama bin Laden on television as the embodiment of evil, his appearance and
dress conveying the symbolic message that Islam, the Arabs, and terrorism are
organically interwoven. Conservative bias mistakenly took attention from the
American criminal in 1995 and prompted widespread focus on Arab-Americans as
the primary suspects in the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City. This mass media
mistake about Muslim blame allegedly prompted some 200 ugly incidents before
the real perpetrator was identified. Media have miscast Muslims as semitic
Arabs and caused the Muslim MAJORITY in South and Southeast Asia to be
anti-American.

The current corporate owners seek stories that cater
to angry, middle-aged white men who listen to talk radio and yell at their
television. Carville and Begala, p 209.

Concentrated media ownership, presenting only one
point of view, destroys democracy. When he first ran for president, the unified
media described President Bush as a ‘moderate’. He wasn’t, and we weren’t given
others’ opinions. Because it’s cheaper for the concentrated media, they now do
few investigations and just take the ‘news’ from the easiest, cheapest source,
serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power instead of questioning,
investigating and reporting. Concentrated ownership limits what we learn.
Increased stock and personal wealth of the corporate owners of
AOLTimeWarnerGeneralElectricDisney-WestinghouseNewsCorp has resulted. This
change of not hearing from both sides occurred when Reagan’s Federal
Communications Commission repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. Then
reporters and broadcasters were no longer required to allow the other sides of
each question to give us issues of public importance and mandated airtime.168 .

Now they decide THEIR conclusions and give reports that
draw popular attention away from the issues or favor their view. For example, a
Pew Center study found that 76% of the media’s coverage of Al Gore in the 2000
election included one of two themes: that Gore lied and exaggerated, or that he
was marred by scandal. The most common theme about Mr. Bush, was that he was a
“different kind of Republican…40% of ALL stories were on Bush. If some reporter
wrote an unfavorable story about Bush, Bush’s staff cut that reporter out of
future information.

[821] Static:
Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back, Hyperion,
New York, p 8-12. During Bush’s first term as President, 69% of the journalists
appearing on the Sunday shows were conservatives, and 58% of all guests were
Republicans/conservatives

[822] reprint
of “Press Coverage and Political Accountability”, James M. Snyder Jr and David
Stromberg, National Bureau of Economic Research, Atlantic, June 2008, p. 21

[828] oppose
GA R attempt to require $20 to get an ID if they want to vote (an indirect poll
tax). The single best reference to
the problems and solutions to voters issues is the Common Cause Report on the
20098 Election Protection Program by the Common Cause Education Fund, December
2008.

[831] “The
job of management is to maintain an equitable and working balance among the
claims of the various directly affected interest groups…stockholders,
employees, customers and the public” Frank Abrams, chairman of Standard Oil of
New Jersey, 1951.

[832] Jeb Bush’s Rush to Make Money
May Be Hurdle, New York Times, 4/21/2014 p. 1

[843] The Money & Media
Election Complex, The Nation, November 29, 2010, p. 11; Congress now has (June,
2012) 13 bills attempting to counter Citizens United. They seek the 28th
amendment. The organizations joined in opposition are United for the People
(50+ groups). Congress, more than 30 city councils oppose the result of the
decision. The Montana State Supreme Court in December 2011 upheld a 1912 state
law banning corporate campaign contributions. See Jeffrey D. Clements

[853] Z.
Brzezinski, Second Chance, p. 197; 70% of campaign finance given by private
corporations which later ask a
favor; 81% of political donors in congressional elections earned more than $100,000 a year and only 5% earned less
than $50,000. The Economist, April 4-10th, 2009, Special Report, p. 12

[856] NYT
8/16/2008, p. A10; Diebold machines did not produce paper records so electronic
voting makes large-scale vote theft easy; in one Democratic county in Florida,
13% did not record vote for Congress whereas only 2% didn’t in other Florida
county; In Alabama; Governor Siegelman
has been put in jail for political reasons after he lost the election when
after the election, Baldwin County reported a ‘glitch’ had given him 6000 extra
votes, but a check showed it was
electronic ballot stuffing, possibly by an operative who accessed the computers
and ‘edited’ the results. There, the AG threatened to arrest anyone who counted
the paper ballots by hand. No Count was done.NYT,, about August 2008, Adam
Cohen, Editorial Observer “ A Tale of Three (Electronic Voting) Elections
CONGRESS

[858] these
acts are serious violations of the constitution: allowing candidates to raise
funds for their campaigns on the house of worship’s property; explicitly
endorsing a candidate, potential candidate, political party, third-party
movement or candidate draft effort; targeting voter registration or other
election-related activities in specific geographic areas selected because they
are influential, crucial, or partisan districts or wards; coordinating voter
registration, “GOTV” drives, or other election activities with a candidate or
political party; organizing groups to work for a specific candidate; providing
anything of value including space, equipment, mailing lists, or staff time
without charging full market value and allowing equal access to opposing
candidates; or providing space of the distribution of partisan materials on its
property, including “voter guides” that favor a particular candidate or party.

[862] (UPS,
Tacoma, Richard Anderson-Connolly oil and gas gave $2million to Republicans to
favor their interests and only $140,000, to Democrats in 2004 fn93. Private
corporate campaign contributions should be replaced by publicly funded election
campaigns so the people elected will speak to voters instead of only hearing
private interests who later ask for the legislator’s vote on their interests;

[863] voters
rank candidates on their ballot, regardless of party, and eliminate the least
popular candidates until a majority winner is reached; Pierce County about to
act; King Co. could and should follow, then to Olympia to change it for the
whole state (and await the court test)

[865] Common Cause, Seizing the
Moment (fair utility rates, reasonable energy costs, meaningful health care
reforms, or effective environmental policies require that we end the undue
influence of lobbyists from oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, the insurance
industry and other huge lobbying groups that have been footing the bills for candidates’
election campaigns.

[866] the
next nine planks are from the League of Women Voters Reform Agenda; LWV, 1730 M
Street, NW #1000, Washington .D.C.20036

[868] PhD.
dissertation on electronic voting machines would require voter being presented
with a printed ballot which voter gets to check before dropping it in the box.
Yes, Summer 2003, p. 47; also see Regime Change begins at home, supra, p. 17.
California researchers have confirmed voting activists’ fears that machines
from Diebold, Sequoia, and other major suppliers are, indeed, extremely
vulnerable to hacking that alters election results.

[870] to
right leaning and evangelicals re poverty: “They look in our inner cities and
see the hardened faces of drug dealers, crack-addicted mothers, and absent
fathers. We look in our inner cities and see the faces of their children, who
deserve a home and a childhood. They look in the inner cities and they see
broken families. We look I the inner cities and wonder what our own children
would become if they had to grow up in those broken homes. They look at our
inner cities with anger and contempt, and wonder, “Why can’t the act like us?”
We look at our inner cities with sadness, and remember the phrase, “There but
for the graceofGodgoI.” They look at our inner cities and see their moral
depravity. We look at our inner cities and see our moral responsibility.”

What the
voters are running from is the ‘liberal hour”. It lasted only a few years: two
civil rights acts that remade politics across the entire country and in the
South; the unassailable Medicare and Medicare; pioneering environmental laws;
education and immigration bills; stronger protections for consumers; a host of
antipoverty programs, including food stamps and Head Start; a new federal
departments of transporetation anda housing land urban development. We hadn’t
seen such legislative energy since the New Deal NYT 8/13/08, p. B2

[871] 57%
of independents endorse more government help for the needy, even if it means
going deeper into debt. Went 57% for Ds in 2006.

[877] Economists
calculate that international trade adds about $1 trillion a year in benefits to
the U.S. Economy. Even after the
offshoring of white collar jobs, despite the hardship it brings for laid off
workers, it’s a net gain for developed nations like the U.S. and Japan as well
as for the country where the jobs land. Hundreds of millions of poor people
have been lifted from desperate poverty as a result. The best response from the
high-wage developed world is to uncover new sources of job creation rather than
protect the old ones. That’s precisely what worked when farmers were displaced
by the Industrial Revolution. Rubin believes we’ve got to have a first rate
public education system, get our basic research back, get our house in order by
reining in the budget deficit (and recognize that, in the long run, good
environmental policy is good economic policy). Time, Global Business, July 30,
2007, p. 39

For more than three decades, the U.S. has promoted a
series of trade policies whose end result has been a chronic structural deficit
that has left us financially dependent on foreign central banks, the near
collapse of America’s manufacturing sector, and the destruction of a high-wage
social contract Robert Kuttner, supra, p. 217

[886] Failure to agree on domestic standards for
mobile phones is seen as a principal reason why foreign firms were able to
capture both technological and market leads over their U.S. competitors. p. 114

[894] The
more this order bids together capitalism democratic states in deploy rooted
institutions, the more open, consensual, and rule-based it is, and the more
widely spread its benefits, the more likely it will be that rising powers can
and will secure their interests through integration and accommodation rather
than through war. And if the Western system offers rules and institutions that
benefit the full range of states---rising and falling, weak and strong,
emerging and mature---its dominance as an international order is all but
certain. The U.S. should renew its support for wide-ranging, multilateral
institutions, conclude the Doha Round of trade talks, and avoid proliferation of lateral and
regional trade agreements or the world will be broken into competing U.S. and
Chinese spheres. This integration, particularly of the new large economies, is
critical because BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China plus South Africa) could
be larger than the original G-6 G. John
Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs,
January/February 2008, p. 34

[896] These
import duties increase your mortgage and borrowing costs as well as making
imports more expensive.

[897] The
U.S. would be better off if it cut its tariffs and farm subsidies. The Uruguay
round increased world income by roughly $100 billion. If tariffs on
agricultural and industrial goods, and services, were reduced by a third, there
would be further gain of $600 billion, about 2% of world income. When Roosevelt
persuaded Congress to grant him and future presidents rolling pre-approval for
trade treaties, tariff rats in the U.S. fell from about 45% to bout 10% in two
decades. Harford, Tim, The Undercover Economist, 2006, p. 225-7 Subsidies cause
waste and it is Americans, not foreigners, who pay for them. Similarly, the
main victims of Europe’s farm policies are Europeans. Ignore the fact that cheaper imports which
TRULY BENEFIT US MOST are thinly spread and hard for individual consumers to see.
Forget the lie that our gains from trade come mainly from exports we sell.
Gather the exporters who would better be able to sell their goods abroad if ALL
subsidies AND TARIFFS are dropped, to support dropping subsidies. The foreign
tariffs keeping our IMPORT prices high are still relatively comprehensive and
high, which makes our exported goods expensive and shelters their manufacturers
from the foreign competition that would GENERALLY RAISE PRODUCTIVITY AND
GROWTH. Developing countries would
benefit if we dropped subsidies and tariffs. If someone believes in the “market
economy”, they should support this approach. “The Fruitful Lie” by Clive Crook,
The Atlantic, October 2006, p. 30

[900] The
Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Country at a Time, Juhasz, Antonia 2006,
p. 4; WHO warned that it’s agreement with Bolivia, Colombia, El Salvador, and
Venezuela could increase the price of medicines by 200% due to limitation on
support of the local manufacture of generic medicines p. 5, p. 7

72 new members of Congress have publicly committed to
change the current failed trade model. In the process of obtaining better
environmental and labor provisions we should not provide new rights for foreign
oil and gas firms to destroy Colombia’s environmentally critical Amazon region
nor allow multinationals with tax havens in Panama to challenge US policies
that crack down on their tax-dodging. Public Citizen News, May-June 2009, p. 14

[905] Over
40,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide since 1997 in despair at their
inability to earn enough income to repay their debts for high-tech inputs (GD
seeds, pesticides, etc.).

[906] The
Plan: 1) a National-Service Baby Bond, with $5000 for every child born, which
the child could collect when 18-25 if he/she commits to at least one year of
service: for education, starting a business or making down payment on a home;
2) Make National Service a Cabinet-Level Department; 3) Expand Existing
National-Service Programs like AmeriCorps and the National Senior Volunteer
Corps; 4) Create an Education Corps; 5) Institute a Summer of Service; 6) Build
a Health Corps; 7) Launch a Green Corps; 8) Recruit a Rapid-Response Reserve
Corps; 9) Start a National-Service Academy; 10) Create a Baby-Boomer Education
Bond, allowing designating a scholarship of $1000 for every 500 hours of
community service they complete. Cost $20b/year

[918] Historically,
the global balance sheet has favored poor countries. But with the advent of
globalized markets, capital began to move in other direction, and the South now
exports capital to the North, at a skyrocketing rate. According to the UN, in
2006 the net transfer of capital from poorer countries to rich ones was $784
billion, up from $229 billion in 2002. (In 1997, the balance was even It costs
poor countries some $110 billion, 1% of their economies annually, [Joseph
Stiglitz, Columbia professor, says double that]. This is built by the
international agreements, like the WTOs requirements that all member countries
respect patents and copyrights---as poorer countries enter the WTO they must
agree to pay royalties on such goods---and the result is a net obligation of
more than $40 billion annually that poorer countries owe to American and
European corporations. The single largest beneficiary of the intellectual
property system is the pharmaceutical industry (which does not provide research
nor cures for poor peoples’ diseases). And 10 year tax holidays given by poor
countries to induce investment there. And brain drain…40% of college-educated
people emigrate to rich countries: 40% Malawian nurses, 75% of Zambia’s
physicians. And corn, rice or cotton exported by rich countries is so cheap that
small farmers in poor countries cannot compete, so they stop farming. And if we
paid the true cost of oil it would include the costs of the environmental
damage that comes from burning these fuels. But even as we do not pay that
price, other countries do. American energy use is being subsidized by tropical
coastal nations. Rosenberg, Tina,
“Reverse Foreign Aid”, NYT Magazine, p. 16

The World Bank estimates that high food prices will
quickly pull 100m people back below the poverty line, Foreign Policy, Carnegie
Endowment, July/August, 2008, p. 96

[919] The End of the Bush
Revolution, by Gordon, Philip, Foreign Affairs, July-August, 2006

[923] Seattle
Times, 8/5/2007, p. 15; Every time you run a TV ad, or line, stress the steps
in the conscious motives at any time (like crime, violence, race, affirmative
action, immigration) to give you a chance of overwhelming the unconscious
motives (fear, racism) Westen, p. 226 e.g. Clinton on race: Americans value
hard work and fairness, and they believe that anyone who works hard and plays
by the rules deserves whatever his or her talents will bring.” e.g. Kennedy
zeroed straight in on the, accurate, per 1973 as it turns out, character of
Nixon the person; e.g. where ballot initiatives have eliminated affirmative
actions in college admission, we are seeing a precipitous return to segregation
in public universities, Westin, p. 234;
e.g.
allow nothing you want to be labeled a special interest because that violates
precisely the same values of fairness and justice that motivate their
acceptance of the need for affirmative action. “Our commitment is to ALL
Americans who are willing to work hard to make a better life for themselves and
their children, to have a chance at the American dream. We believe in the words of our founding fathers,
that we are all created equal, and that no matter what the color of our skin or
where our ancestors came from, we’re all Americans, and we’re all children of
God. We have witnessed with our own eyes the extraordinary strides toward
racial equality of the last forty years, but we also know that our task is not
yet complete. We know that because if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us
can remember those moments when we’ve encountered someone whose skin color was
different from ours, whose accent was different, or whose face bore the scars
of poverty, who we judged in ways we would not want to be judged ourselves. But
we are a compassionate nation, and we believe in going the extra mile for
people who have not yet shared in the American dream but are willing to work
hard for it. And for the same reason, we reject quotas, because they deny other
Americans their chance at that dream.” Westen, p. 241 (as long as Democrats
fail to turn racism into a CHARACTER ISSUE, Rs will continue to use it as an
instrument of political persuasion.);
e.g.
“We stand with all Americans, white and black, in our belief that it’s time to
end the welfare culture, that welfare should be a safety net and not a way of
life, and that the way to end welfare dependency is to put an end to the
poverty that breeds it. If we can fight wars in distant lands, we can dedicate
ourselves as a nation to the eradication of poverty on our soil, and which is
the only way to defeat the crime, violence, drug abuse, and hopelessness that
afflict our inner cities and parts of rural America. The way to win this war is
through hard work and personal responsibility on the part of those who want a
better life for themselves and their children, and through a partnership of
government, business, and religious institutions. That means providing tax
incentives to businesses that provide jobs and affordable health care to those
who want to help themselves, and creating the conditions for people of faith to
DEMONSTRATE their fait New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008, p. 26h, by
partnering wealthy churches, synagogues, and mosques with places of worship in
the inner cities, to help build homes, hope and connections across our
communities. And it means building colleges instead of prisons so that poor
teenagers who want to work hard and lift themselves out of poverty can see a
light at the end of the tunnel other than the dim red light of crime and
drugs.” Westen, p. 242 and the same for subsidies and tariffs of corporate
welfare

e.g.
hew to traditional middle-class values

e.g. show results, or you’re “throwing good money after bad”

e.g. don’t deny legitimate concerns of conservatives…about violence,
drugs, absent fathers and teenage mothers…those denials are patently absurd;
like re Bush”where I come from we call that a drunk”

e.g. appeal to evangelical Christians, whose faith tells them that there
is no greater sin than having two coats when your neighbor is cold and has
none.

It behooves both the Jews and the Arabs to settle their
differences in a Christian manner (The Best Little… in Texas) 2004:
Ahmadinejad, fanatic, like Bush, elected over the Gucci revolutionaries,
working for the

poor and disenfranchised as the Shia always historically
have, surrounded by 4 nuclear powers who are in mo moral position to criticize
nuclear in Iran. The invasion of Iraq (after ditching Iran in Afghanistan)
caused Iran to restate its nuclear weapons program…thought that they were next
on the neo-con (Cheney) list p. 238.

A clerically controlled medieval theocracy

Ironically, Iraq’s only real democratic neighbor is Iran.
The job of creating democracy in Iraq should be left to Iraqis and, equally
importantly, to Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran.

[959] The New Asian Hemisphere: The
Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, by Kishore Mahbubani

[971] Joseph
Stiglitz The problem is that the ‘rules of the game’ have largely been set
aside by U.S. corporate interests. Multinational corporations have taken the
natural resources of poor countries. Leaving the people, or sovereign wealth
funds holding some of the resource for the future, not giving the payment to
their rich, would ensure that they get full value for their resources. Western
banks have burdened poor countries with unsustainable debt. At the World Bank
he was thrown out by Lawrence Summers for saying that Washington inspired
policies to promote economic development in poor countries but are, instead,
allowing them. The IMF during the East Asian meltdown in 1997-1998 was a poorly
conceived bailout which turned slowdowns into recessions, and recessions into
depressions. GATT, WTO, NAFTA, etc, have been heavily weighted in favor of the
rich countries which used their greater knowledge and economic power to
out-bargain poor countries. The world should provide grants instead of loans,
or an ‘orderly way of restructuring and reducing debt’ and an International
Credit Court to provide ways to escape odious debt. These poor countries have
forced liberalization of trade---first in industrial goods, then in skilled
services---on poor countries, while retaining their own ;poor-country exports.
He proposes a new principle for international trade agreements: reciprocity
among equals, but differentiation between countries in different states of
development Rich countries should open up their markets to poor ones without
demanding reciprocal access to poor countries and without imposing their own
labor or environmental standards on those countries. Poor countries should be
allowed to keep tariffs. Rich countries should phase out agricultural subsidies
(New Zealand successfully did so in 1984) they should encouraqe the immigration
of unskilled labor. They should refrain from among bilateral trade agreements,
which allow special interests to operate in the dark. True enough, he concedes,
all this might lead to job losses in rich countries, but these should be
compensated by “better adjustment assistance, stronger safety nets, and better
macro-economic management as well as “more investment in technology land
education’” He vigorously attacks TRIPS---trade-related intellectual property
rights,.; TRIPS have imposed on the entire world the dominant intellectual
property regime in the U.,S. and Europe. New drugs could saved millions of
lives in poor countries, but they are unaffordable because they are protected
by patents that allow the drug companies to charge monopoly prices for a period
of twenty years or more. By including patent protection in the WTO American and
European negotiators signed a “death warrant” for thousands of people in the
poorest countries of the world. Pharmaceutical companies should be forced to
sell life-preserving drugs to poor countries at near costs---or face compulsory
licensing of generic drugs that can be produced by, and traded between,
developing countries. Countries buying our debt should be discouraged because
they suffer staggering “opportunity costs” the alternative opportunities
foregone---to when earning only 1-2% as against the 10-15% that could be earned
in high-return domestic projects.

We should minimize the damage corporations do to
society and maximize their net contribution: strengthen corporate social
responsibility, prevent monopolies or cartels, increases the scope of liability
for environmental damage, make possible class action suits at a global level,
and create WTO rules against unfair competition and bribery. NY Review of
Books, Robert Skidelsky, Gloomy About Globalization, reviewing Making
Globalization Word, Joseph Stiglitz..

[978] (between
you and me), why not ditch nuclear weapons entirely, and force Israel to do the
same, then approach ALL others?

[979] NYT,
Sunday Opinion, 5/24/09, p. 10.(Floyd Leverett directs the New Amer4ica
foundation’s geopolitics of energy initiative and teaches at Penn State’s
School of International Affairs, Hillary Mann Leverett is the president of a
political risk consultancy. Both are former National Security Council staff
members.)

[985] Obama
and the Middle East, Hussein Agha & Robert Malley, New York Review of
Books, June 11, 2009, p. 69

[986] Israel
should be instructed, on pain of losing American military and foreign aid, that
it must discontinue its manifest violations of international treaties: 1)
foreigners’ battle deaths; attempting to justify aggression as legal ‘defense’
(Article 51); collective punishments (Article 33) by sealed borders and
blockades;; deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure; willful killing of
civilians having no military function; illegal use of phosphorous, etc;
deliberate employment of disproportionate force (Geneva, Nuremburg)

[989] The
Palestine-Israeli issue should have received immediate, intense, attention
after the death of Prime Minister Rabin because that indicated a turn to the
right which makes peace less likely and turns Israel to the right. Z
Brzezinski, Second Chance, p. 184 Attention to Palestine’s concerns would not
mean turning away from Israel: a decision by the international community to
assume the ultimate moral and financial responsibility for the Palestinians’
plight would give Israel an opportunity to close the book upon Palestinian
claims once and for all. Develop and help fund return of Israeli refugees from
the Arab world, to avoid Israeli feeling that many states have a one-sided
approach to refugee issues. The US and its allies should ask what it can do to
help Israel take the risks and make the sacrifices required to give peace a
chance. Bush 41, delayed by his 1992 race, failed to secure, at a time of
American dominance after reversing
Saddam, demilitarization of Palestine and no right of return for Palestinians
in addition to this request. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Second Chance, p.77

[995] One
plan would have us redirect 10 to 20% of the military budget and redirect it
toward building schools and hospitals worldwide, fighting poverty, training
people in skills for a new globalized world, and providing relief from
HIV/AIDS. We could invest the money in local businesses, follow up with the
largest deployment of American peace activists in history, a revamped version
of the Peace Corps. Tikkun, January/February 2009, p. 78

[996] The Role of the Villian: Iran
and U.S. Foreign Policy, by Paul R. Pillar, Political Science Quarterly, Vol
128, #2, Summer, 2013, p. 211

[997] Make
clear to Iran that the bomb is a magnet for attack, can only accomplish a
limited set of objectives, and will not produce the benefits it anticipates but
will isolate and weaken the regime. U.S. should lay down concise ‘redlines’
designating ‘unacceptable behavior’ (initiating conventi0onal warfare, using or
transferring nuclear weapons, materials or technologies nor stepped \-up
support for terrorist or subversive activities) and being willing to use
military force if Tehran crosses them. Maintain economic pressure. Convince
Israel (200 nuclear weapons) that the US will deter Iran. After Iran Gets the
Bomb: Containment and Its Complications, James M. Lindsay and Ray Takeyh,
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2010, p. 33

[998] New
York Times, July 16, 2006, opinion, Robert Wright, An American Foreign Policy
that Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With (filed)

[999] Latin America may have ‘decoupled’ from the disabled U.S.
economy (growing at 5% a year since 2004), inflation has been generally low,
direct investment is arriving in record quantities and prices for many of it’s
key commodity exports continue to rise, but a prolonged recession in the U.S.
would be costly for them, but it should be imitating Chile’s rigorously
counter-cyclical policies, saving and spending its extra tax revenues on
investment on education, productivity and technology. The Economist, 4/12-18,
p. 41; Foreign Affairs
review of Reid, Michael Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s
Soul, 2007)

[1002] Chile,
with Michelle Bachelet, has booming construction in Santiago, rising prices for
its commodity exports to the U.S., E.U. and, above all, to the rising economies
of East Asia, especially China. Educational opportunities have been expanded.
Chile now compares itself to the Asian economies like Singapore and South
Korea. NYT, Bona Fides Examples of Poetic Justice, 11/18/07, p. 53